Alternative interaction methods

As I metioned earlier, I have been playing a lot of games, to try out the interaction methods. Two af the games I downloaded had some alternative interaction methods, compared to most of the others.

Gordy

I found a game, where the controls was NOT to tap the screen and drag a figure… Instead, to control which way Gordy runs you pres an area on the left side of the screen marked right or left, To jump, you press the jump area on the right side of the screen and to do anything else, you press the fourth area, which is only active, when you can do something else. Other things could be, dragging/pulling items and opening doors.

The game is more advanced than most of the other games I have played, and it had great graphics. The graphics kind of reminded me of a classic Wii game. Even though the game was quite advanced it was also immensely simple and once again simplicity has ensured great gameplay.

Dungeon Defense

Dungeon Defense is in many ways similar to Gordy, but still very different. When I first tried it out, I was unable to make my player move – the controls were too difficult, and I did not have the time to figure out what to do. I let a friend borrow the Xoom one evening, and he was thrilled to get a change for playing Dungeon Defense. He had the same problems as me, but changed the controls.

He played for about ½ hour, and started to get a feeling with the game, but there were still too many controls making it too complex to play. (Though maybe with a bit of training, it will be more fun?)

It turned out, that before he had changed the controls, they were similar to the controls in Gordy, but it was not as intuitively displayed. Therefore it was very hard to get started. Also the game was much more complex with many different tasks on a lot of controls! Behind most control buttons was an expansion of choices necessary to use the controls, which created a lot of pauses during the game.

Clearly the game was inspired by similar games for a normal desktop computer, where a lot of these controls would be more intuitive from using the mouse and keyboard.