MM on iPhone

[Alanfalcon]

VernJensen wrote: An Apple employee was just telling me today of another developer The only question is if it makes *sense*, given the controls.... up, down, left, right, jump, and action... how would that translate to the iPhone? I could superimpose a control pad over the screen, but I'm not sure if that would work well. Or have players tilt left/right/up/down to move Jack, and jolt the iPhone up real quick to make him Jump. ... Thoughts?

-Vern

If you want Tilt Controls as an option, I'm all for it.  But not as the only option for controlling Jack.  It's far too imprecise for me.

I've been mulling a control scheme, and think using touch regions (fully explained, with graphical buttons, of course) could work well.  To start, I made this super quick example of playing the game in portrait mode *attached*.  The advantage is that you get to see the whole playing field without covering it with controls, but the disadvantage is that the screen gets shrunk down probably too much.  The play field here is 1/2 MM's size, so it is 320x240.  And the iPhone's screen ha a high resolution so that makes the physical size very small.    I also haven't worked out how to distinguish between 'up' and 'jump' - you could use a gesture, but then things start to get VERY complicated.  The yellowish regions are the

easy mode

jump left and jump right.  I think you'll need those for the game to work on the iPhone.  The purple/pink regions move Jack left/right, the red region is duck/climb down, and the green region is for jump/climb up.  While at the base of a ladder or on a ladder or vine, the region moves Jack up.  To jump off a vine, you have to use the yellow regions.  

The area above the play field is for Jack Lives, Inventory, Score, and could all function as a large pause button which allows you to go to maps, or suspend game, or abort game.  The maps would be fantastic using iPhone native pinch to zoom techniques.  

Anyway, I think the winning solution involves playing MM in landscape mode, not portrait mode, so this is all moot -- but maybe it is interesting fodder for conversation or further development.