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DESIGNING A MOBILE RPG
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Sailerius
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CloseHaving recently gotten a start into Android development, I've started thinking about some of the challenges a designer would face if attempting to make an RPG for the mobile platform. I thought I'd start up a topic and see what other people think.
* Input. Most mobile devices depend upon touch for the majority of input. This means no cursor for menus and that menu options have to be large enough to be precisely manipulated by a finger press. How do you design menus, particularly a battle system, when you need to upsize all of the options?
* Resolution. This goes hand in hand with the input problem; you're dealing with a much smaller screen, but you need objects you can touch to be large enough to be easily manipulated.
* Exploration. With the main form of input being touch and drag, how do you have fields or dungeons that you can navigate? How do you have touch encounters when you don't have as much freedom of movement?
EDIT: This isn't a topic to discuss "why would you want to make an RPG on a mobile platform?" Please keep posts like that out of the topic.
* Input. Most mobile devices depend upon touch for the majority of input. This means no cursor for menus and that menu options have to be large enough to be precisely manipulated by a finger press. How do you design menus, particularly a battle system, when you need to upsize all of the options?
* Resolution. This goes hand in hand with the input problem; you're dealing with a much smaller screen, but you need objects you can touch to be large enough to be easily manipulated.
* Exploration. With the main form of input being touch and drag, how do you have fields or dungeons that you can navigate? How do you have touch encounters when you don't have as much freedom of movement?
EDIT: This isn't a topic to discuss "why would you want to make an RPG on a mobile platform?" Please keep posts like that out of the topic.
Fist
34
One option for movement can be the point and click method. Battles could be real time, like diablo. Of course I can imagine how hard coding that would be like..
Blitzen
3253
I think that a double-press "button & window" scheme lends itself to fingerpresses.
IE you have buttons with symbols on them. You press once to activate that particular event/object, the information about which is displayed somwhere else on the screen, unobscured by the finger. Then you activate or complete the action by selecting a target for your action.
Manipulating objects on the screen then then is about economy of space and balance of formal and functional elements. My advice on that part would be to design with eas-of-use in mind and then refine to accomodate the skinning of the elements without giving up the design choices you made as to thier functionality in the first place.
I think that maybe using the map, where the player-character is more or less static, might be a way to get around the design problem of having to input navigation. Touch the top of the screen and the map scrolls up, or something like that.
My two cents.
IE you have buttons with symbols on them. You press once to activate that particular event/object, the information about which is displayed somwhere else on the screen, unobscured by the finger. Then you activate or complete the action by selecting a target for your action.
Manipulating objects on the screen then then is about economy of space and balance of formal and functional elements. My advice on that part would be to design with eas-of-use in mind and then refine to accomodate the skinning of the elements without giving up the design choices you made as to thier functionality in the first place.
I think that maybe using the map, where the player-character is more or less static, might be a way to get around the design problem of having to input navigation. Touch the top of the screen and the map scrolls up, or something like that.
My two cents.
ariedonus
41
I have seen the use of a mock-joystick on touch-screen games to make movement more viable. Simply have a joystick that you touch and drag to emulate an actual joystick for movement.
As far as the battle design goes, don't make the battles super-dependent on menus. A lot of information can be transformed into simple images for easy reference (HP, MP, status effects, etc.) Also, instead of wasting space with text, make the menus more icon-based, like I think Blitzen was suggesting.
As far as the battle design goes, don't make the battles super-dependent on menus. A lot of information can be transformed into simple images for easy reference (HP, MP, status effects, etc.) Also, instead of wasting space with text, make the menus more icon-based, like I think Blitzen was suggesting.
DFalcon
2141
Interesting question. I don't really know anything about it, but a couple ideas:
Even if your recognized input area has to be big-finger-sized, it doesn't necessarily mean that the icon you show for it has to take up all your screen real estate. Stick a four-direction menu in the middle of the screen (maybe pointed toward corners rather than straight up-down-left-right like e.g. Lufia's) and you could register any press in a quadrant as a press for that button.
Slightly less off-the-wall: zoom in and out and around, a lot. If you're picking anything more complicated than "attack" for a character, you probably don't need to see much of the battle besides that character while you're in that particular menu. Picking a target, you probably don't need to see the side you can't target. Etc.
Even if your recognized input area has to be big-finger-sized, it doesn't necessarily mean that the icon you show for it has to take up all your screen real estate. Stick a four-direction menu in the middle of the screen (maybe pointed toward corners rather than straight up-down-left-right like e.g. Lufia's) and you could register any press in a quadrant as a press for that button.
Slightly less off-the-wall: zoom in and out and around, a lot. If you're picking anything more complicated than "attack" for a character, you probably don't need to see much of the battle besides that character while you're in that particular menu. Picking a target, you probably don't need to see the side you can't target. Etc.
Kaempfer
1932
I have an mobile RPG, it came with my horrible phone. I have a touch phone, but I also have the fairly standard "four direction and a selector" pad at the bottom along with the green and red call buttons. Most Android phones aren't 100% touch (like, say, the iPhone is), so control shouldn't be too difficult.
http://shop.windmobile.ca/ProductCatalog/Handsets/ProductImage.axd?id=Huawei+U7519&type=LargeImage&Width=220&Height=300 (is what I mean! The box at the bottom is five buttons.)
Larger, simpler menus (streamlined, not dumbed down) allow touch usage, anyway. DFalcon's use of a Lufia-type directional menu (although he said maybe not to do it like that) is actually a good idea. It'd work with the 4-way control pad at the bottom or with touch controls. Selecting enemies would be obviously a matter of selecting them with a touch or with a drag (for multiple enemies).
Older PC games (like the King's Quest series) commonly used a "click and walk" setup, and there's no reason a touchscreen couldn't emulate that. Walk around, hit the center key or the NPC on the screen to talk to them/bring up context menu, voila! RPG gameplay elements can be simplified into "walking" and "menus", so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to build one for a touch screen.
http://shop.windmobile.ca/ProductCatalog/Handsets/ProductImage.axd?id=Huawei+U7519&type=LargeImage&Width=220&Height=300 (is what I mean! The box at the bottom is five buttons.)
Larger, simpler menus (streamlined, not dumbed down) allow touch usage, anyway. DFalcon's use of a Lufia-type directional menu (although he said maybe not to do it like that) is actually a good idea. It'd work with the 4-way control pad at the bottom or with touch controls. Selecting enemies would be obviously a matter of selecting them with a touch or with a drag (for multiple enemies).
Older PC games (like the King's Quest series) commonly used a "click and walk" setup, and there's no reason a touchscreen couldn't emulate that. Walk around, hit the center key or the NPC on the screen to talk to them/bring up context menu, voila! RPG gameplay elements can be simplified into "walking" and "menus", so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to build one for a touch screen.
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