Weekly devlog #14 - android controls

Hi everyone, this week I made a lot of progress on the controls of the android version.

Making the game easy to control is an important thing to me. A lot of games are designed PC first, and mobile second. But since this game will probably have a large mobile player base, I want the game to be designed with mobile players in mind first. For example I know I want to keep the controls simple, to minimize the amount of buttons needed on a touch screen.

Hotbar
I have added the hotbar customization options from pc over to android. You can now hold a hotbar slot, and it will pop up a menu. And inside this menu there are the options to lock or clear a hotbar slot. I think this will also make it easier for players to know that you can clear a hotbar slot. Many players on PC didn't know about the ability to lock or clear hotbar slots until I told them.

Breaking blocks
Because the block size in my game is quite small, it was quite a challenge to make breaking blocks easy to control on android. On PC I fixed this issue by adding an "auto block select" mode. If you press left control it enables or disables a green cursor that selects the next block in the direction of your cursor. So the most logical things was to add this to android too, but I didn't want to clutter the screen with another button.

So what I added instead is that if you double tap and hold, it enables the "auto block select" mode. This makes it super easy to switch between break modes on android, and you also don't have to keep track of if you have the auto break mode on. One problem is that I do have to teach this mechanic in the tutorial, but I think that is worth it.

Placing blocks
The next challenge was placing blocks. For small blocks they will just be placed wherever you put your finger. But for blocks that take up multiple tiles this just doesn't work. Players will misplace blocks a lot, this also happened in the PC version when there was no block preview yet. But on android you can't hover your mouse over where you want to place it, your finger is either pressing the screen or it is not.

The solution I came up with is to add ghost blocks. You can drag and drop a block from your hotbar  into the world, and it will create one of these ghost blocks. Then if you like the location of the block you can click anywhere on the ghost block, and it will place it. If you don't like the position of the ghost block you can use any of your tools to instantly remove it. Or you can create a new ghost block at a different location. An added benefit from these ghost blocks is that you can test out designs of your world without wasting any blocks!

Next android test
I think I will do the next android test this week. There are still a few bugs left, and the ghost blocks don't work fully yet. If you are interested in becoming part of our android testers you can fill in this form.