I have been noticing a lot of cloud support. I must agree to it. I can't tell you how many times I have lost so much from having to restore my phone. or maybe even creating such a way to put a save on the computer. like creating a false MP3 that holds all the data. so in that case when we sync the device it will take in that save and load it up. also. updates. I hate it when games don't take the advantages that the app store gives them. it allows instant updating. I don't want to wait until that useless feature is added. if my game is crashing I want it fixed as soon as possible. but I have also heard that it can take a few weeks to get the update across. I want a game engine for the iPhone. I am currently using cocos2d and it feels like a completely different syntax. if I could get a pro game engine I might the syntax later on when I tried to make mods or even get hired as a programmer could really benefit me. I hear udk is working on the mobile devices. i don't know how much longer it is going to take. but I would love to work with the quake engine.
Remembered another vital one. MAKE YOUR APPS UNIVERSAL!!! i dont want any of this 'youve bought our game onve now you can pay five times as much for basically the same game on a bigger screen' bull. I would much rather pay A$3.99 or A$4.99 for a universal app than only pay A$1.19 for an ophone app but be charged A$5.99 for an ipad only version. Unversal apps also look nicer in the itunes app list and take ip less space than two seperate apps
im cool with animation to move the story along. but if iv seen it once. Allow me to turn off animation movie in the options. would love if gameloft did that.. yeah i know i can stop the movie, but why should i have to stop it.. give me a option to never run it in the options. only read a few pages and what i saw was pretty good.. chris.
-Universal apps (that is, support for both iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad in one app without a separate, overpriced "HD" version for the ipad). I mean, with the retina display on touch 4g and iphone4 the resolution is almost as high as the ipad anyway. And let the game be scalable and look better on a 4g device compared to a 2g or 3g, but still let it support the older ones. -I like the earlier suggestion about options to improve battery life. If there are significant gains to be had in battery life by throttling the fps to 30 compared to 60 I think a lot of people would use that in some situations. Then back to 60 when they are at home and close to a USB port. I understand something like RAGE will be squeezing out everything it can but remember these are mobile devices. It's true that I tend to play games that use less battery more often. - This is more ipod touch focused, but if the game is communicating over the network constantly maybe allow it to queue up whatever it needs to do so that you can play single player with the wifi turned off (huge battery saver) then next time the game is on with wifi enabled, it can do whatever it needs to do that it couldn't while wifi was off. - You already mentioned the autosave whenever home button is pressed, which I agree with 100%.
I didn't read all of the thread and I'm sure it's been said before. But we really need a way to back up our saves. Plus+ does this in the cloud but unfortunately there aren't a lot of games to support it. In my opinion this is the 1st feature that should be worked on. There's no incentive to play a full featured game if I'm going to lose my save. I wish apple had some official way of doing this. iTunes backups generally slow down your phone if you restore to then
If rage is running at 60 fps on the iPhone 4, could we please also play it in 3D with red/cyan (and those other colored) 3D glasses? That's always a nice extra!
Yes, a lot of games pull it off okay. But would you really argue that this is on par with playing these kinds of games with real thumbsticks on a proper console? They're suited to that control scheme. Putting it virtually on a touchscreen here you're only emulating that much-better-implemented-elsewhere control scheme. Anything made like this is quite simply a "ooh, look, we have a port of this on the iPhone too" game. It's fine if you just want a quick buck to add your franchise / game to yet another platform, but it really doesn't push the platform further as a truly great gaming platform in its own right with a unique and revolutionary input method. On an iPad you have almost 10 inches of awesome tactile real estate that you can use with as few or as many fingers as you like. Embrace that!
Use the touchscreen to its advantage. Let the player manipulate game objects and movement directly, not by on-screen buttons or pads. Make the game start quick and easy. 1 loading/logo screen, 1 tap to start the game. Tutorial if needed should be integrated in game. You dont want to resume playing directly into a battle with monsters, so resume on a save point just before. Some games, like in a puzzle game for example, with short levels, you want to start from the beginning of the current level.
I'd really like to see this for every game. It's the perfect companion for a modern gaming platform which is totally independent from physical media.
If you don't have any thumbsticks, how are you going to aim and move at the same time? I agree 100% on these (especially about releasing Doom 2)^ I would like to see these too. And while we are requesting game ports, I would also like Quake 1. This is why I normally don't buy HD apps, so this is a must^
The absolute first would be to read the iPhone HIG. You'll be amazed how many game developers think interface design doesn't apply to them because their interface happens to not be in Cocoa Touch. Obviously most of the rules there don't apply to custom interfaces, but a lot of guidelines are indispensible. Many game menus inexplicably use buttons with hit-boxes smaller than 40×40 px. Be aware of the application metaphors in iOS. Quitting an app and tabbing to another are identical operations. So make relaunching mid-game (kill -CONT when multitasking) as painless and fast as possible. The worst sin on this is making a gameplay distinction between suspending-then-resuming and quitting-then-relaunching. The user has neither control over nor insight on when background apps in iOS 4 are pruned, and so should never have to nervously keep relaunching your game out of fear it'll be killed while IMing between encounters or whatever. The APIs give you a full ten minutes to do background state storage and cleanup after suspension, so use it. Ideally, the user should never care about and barely even notice the difference between pausing, suspending and quitting. Considering how easy it is to rage quit (no pun intended), you don't want to punish people for it. A drag shouldn't cancel when it leaves the origin container. Just like when you scroll a view in Cocoa Touch beyond the touch-to-edge distance, if a finger exits, say, the analog stick area, it should still register as a stick movement. And since your eyes are everywhere but on the control surface (if you can even see them from your fingers), you have no feedback on when you're out of bounds. So prefer to let a 60px left-swipe always count as a full-speed left turn, even if the finger actually ends up in the center of the area. Use software to compensate for lack of physical feedback. Two-handed input mustn't cover the speaker. Supporting both landscape orientations helps a lot. Also make sure everything is easily accessible in both orientations while headphones are used. Recognize non-tap gestures when appropriate. For instance, two buttons to cycle through weapons is perfectly adequate, but a swipe to the right on the HUD could jump to the knife/∞-ammo handgun. Discoverable features that let you get to a known state from any situation are excellent contenders. Remember, though, that swipes by definition take longer than taps. Use attractive, low-key loading screens. Pour a little charm into it; have a ball roll around you can toy with using the accelerometer or something. Anything to take the edge off that awkward silence between going oh hey dude, look at this awesome game and seizing the controls. I know this is an embedded environment and all, but come on you're John Carmack! Okay, maybe that's a little much, but at least make them not suck. Don't punish the user for receiving push notifications. They're already interrupting enough without forcing you to sit through five seconds of countdown or furiously tap the jump button, fearing you'll miss the jump you were a centisecond from making when Angry Birds rudely squawked. Consider replaying the last few seconds of gameplay to let you get back in the groove. Oh, and make sure you can wipe dust off the screen without dismissing the pause screen man that's annoying. Whatever you do, don't abuse Default.png (the image presented while an app launches). I know it's loading like every other app does right when launched, so writing that on the startup image is just cheesy. Allow me to quote the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines: Relatedly, get in the action right from launch. If I'm downloading your game, I'm not doing it to admire your menu layout or watch a ten minute (unskippable, unrewatchable) intro cinematic that may-or-may-not-but-how-would-I-know-because-I-haven't-played-the-game-yet have crucial plot info. The menu, settings screen, calibration function, et cetera are all secondary to the game itself, so the latter should be the first you see. Make transition animations superficial. If you have series of elements and let a tap select an element with a transition from the previous, make the visual movement happen after the actual effect has taken place. Making you wait for an animation to finish (or worse, forcing you to predict and tap 150ms early) just discourages swift control. If you have a long table and use your own GUI widgets, make a tap on the status bar scroll to the top like everywhere else. For some reason, a huge portion of games appear to have a disastrously long timeout when tapping with two fingers simultaneously, I believe to detect a pinch gesture which is useless, of course. This means a roughly two-hundred-and-friggin-fifty millisecond delay when you try doing a sideways jump in a sidescroller, which is beyond unacceptable. On a more metaphorical note, I implore you to keep in mind that iOS devices primarily operate by direct manipulation. You don't use a scroll bar, you drag a surface. You don't drag an arbitrarily placed zoom slider, you pinch areas as if elastic. Similarly, when considering input methodologies, the first should always be as direct as possible. Before a thumbstick even crosses your mind, the default must be simply putting a finger on the screen and dragging the world to turn the camera. All the right neurons are firing when you're just moving what you want moved, instead of (albeit muscle-memoried within minutes) arbitrarily instructing the device to do so. And always make the visual feedback follow suit; it's just plain ugly for a sideways scroll to not begin until you've released the finger from a swipe. Also, when using the accelerometer for input, be aware of the rotations' effect on the screen. Strive to use this to your advantage. Accelerometer manipulation is far from as ingrained in the average user as analog sticks and arrow keys, so the more leverage of natural movement in knee-jerk situations the better. It's much easier to make an instinctive turn if the screen acts as a window into a static world, as opposed to the hardware simply acting as a modernistic mouse again, layers of abstraction begone! Oh, and make sure you fill up your music audio buffers nice and good so it fades out when locking and quitting. On a final note, kudos for doing this. It's rare to see such levelheadedness from somebody big on the scene. We need more of that. Sorry this wound up so long; I didn't have time to write a shorter post.
I have never been a fan of anybody but there's few people in my whole life that I was close to be a fan, Bobby Fisher, Phillip K. Dick, Jimmy Connors, Bjork and well John Carmack and sorry to embarrass you. I'd like thank you for all the effort you made so many years to support gaming on Mac and try release all your games and engines on it during a very long time. Anyway interesting question here my suggestions, many are coming from the site www.gamesuncovered.com: Profile management that includes saves and preferences. Games with multiple modes should offer saves for each mode. An option to show or not in game the time and battery state. Accelerometer calibrating for games with such controls. Allow custom neutral position of the device for any game using Tilt controls. If auto setup of neutral position is implemented for tilt controls give an option to disable it and allow manual setup in game. Allow custom position and size of any pad and action button, it ends with a whole in game interface movable. And few different default setup well though will be handy. For any iphone game detect the iPad and adapt any swipe controls to doubled screen involving swipe two times longer and two times faster if length and speed are an important element of swipe controls. Implement an auto zoom effect under and around the finger for any drag controls requiring a high precision. Have local boards for any game with scores and achievements. Allow change options without quitting the game and with pausing the action if this is possible. I'd like add some I consider more optional: Try offer controls options using no or less pads. Offer zoom in/out for games with a game board larger than the screen. Avoid as much than possible force the player use manual scrolling of play screen and instead use some more automatic system. Now rather our of topic but I want take the opportunity: I know the effort and thinking and tunning you put in controls of Classic Doom. But you should try some other first person perspective game using more swipe controls like Battle Bears-1 that I quote only for this point. Also the point and touch system for moving like saw in a concurrent engine I won't quote here is a good idea to think of for 3D first person perspective games. Another idea of design to think of is to use multitouch to implement fire instead of using a fire button.
Hopefully not too late, here is another serious suggestion (and not a ridiculous wishlist where I demand all games are free and downloading them results in cotton candy delivered to my door by scantily clad women.) Probably my longest lasting pet peeve of nearly every game in the entire app store, that nobody seems to care about, is this: TURN DOWN THE (EFFECTIVE) VOLUME. Yes, that's right. Why is it that every stupid game's audio is about 8 times louder than, say, the audio from a movie or a song from iPod? This is wrong. Period. So my suggestion for the TCR is to make the effective volume match that which would come out of the iPod app for any given volume setting as best as possible. What happens now? Well I'll be listening to my music with my in-ear headphones at a relatively low (maybe 30%) volume setting and enjoying things, then decide to pull up a game and blast some creeps and a few seconds into the loading screen BAM I'm being made deaf because for some reason game audio is thousands of times louder. (Minor exaggeration) So please... add this to a tcr
100% agree. Great point, and something that is done very very rarely in non-UIKit games(ie. most games). 100% disagree. *every single game* "abuses" this, and most apps too. It's a great place to put a quick splash screen, and with the multitasking in iOS 4, it'll only be seen very rarely anyway.
Best list I have found... Is from this very forum... http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=1329642&postcount=53#cocos2d by Adams Immersive, Senior Member
Things to avoid: 1. Offering no face to face multiplayer mode if it's an iPad version (or only offering one without real interaction between players, like "side by side racing" where one racer won't affect the other). 2. Taking several intro screens and settings screens before you can actually start to play. 3. Game hard to control and understand, easy to get stuck. 4. Bad flow, constant interruptions to game-play. 5. As opposed to what some said here, I would say don't overwhelm the users with options, rather find the best default and only go for options if it turns out absolutely necessary in testing. I'd rather be stuck with a very good control than have a bunch of average controls with the off-chance option I'll discover my perfect control. 6. I second the thing about avoiding tiny press areas. Some games are ruined by constant presses to the "wrong" neighbor button. 7. I'm not a big fan of unlockable content in a game. If I paid for it, I don't want to play through tons of boring stuff to get to the good stuff... and also, unlocked stuff tends to get erased when you move the game from one device to the next. If it's a 3D shooter, make it easy to begin and harder to master, giving both the casual 5 minute players as well as the hardcore players something for their money. Keep in mind that when working with limited controls (the iPhone is no joystick), it's better to make compromises and go for some defaults rather than allow full control freedom. For instance, some racing games don't require you to press for gas, you only need to touch when braking, so this already eases the gameplay. And perhaps with a 3D game, be more original, like by not having shooting or slashing be the core (or not the only core) game play.
I hate seeing this: In app push notification Rate Preditors We'd prefer not to Body Slice you. so please take a moment to rate PREDITORStm. Thanks for your support! I would rate your app if I liked it. Don't go asking me to.
