Touching

As I’m sure you’ve seen, in recent weeks we’ve been working on alternate interface strategies. A lot of time has been sunk into making them, just so that we could test to see if they actually felt good to play with (since you can only theorycraft so far). We’re pretty happy with what we’ve come up with so far, as it enables some different play styles, but there is another motivation for these additions: Touch screens.

We’ve known from the start that we wanted to bring DD to touch devices. The time it takes to play a dungeon, and its ‘wait for user input’ nature make DD perfect for devices where you may need to ‘look up’ every now and again. The only problem we foresee is the interface. Touch devices have no real answer to mousing over something, which in DD, has been central to how you gather information (and boy do  you need that information). So all of our new interface code has been to try and allow multiple ‘taps’ to do things, instead of ‘mouseover, then tap’. The current right-click selection will be the default tap-on-an-enemy action on touch devices, showing you combat prediction, and enemy stats, without fear of you killing yourself.

This week, we’re also adding the ‘pop-up’ interface to the normal way of playing. We think that it could be useful for mouse players, and touch devices, as it gives you the options of the thing your mouse is over, right where your cursor is.

I can’t wait to play DD on a tablet.