Direct manipulation

In Finger Hero (our game that was in development at the time) you use your finger to control your character’s position on the screen. This is the basic feature of the game — the feeling of direct manipulation. But there was a problem — we wanted to include a way of controlling speed that you’re moving as well. A virtual joystick was not an option for us (good enough is not good enough here), and there was no easy way to introduce it. There were a couple of solutions that we had tried out, but they had never felt as direct as we wanted. So we kept ignoring the problem and focused on other parts of the game, even have been considering removing speed control from Finger Hero.

The introduction of 3D Touch

As game developers we love new technology, new ways of interaction, and mostly we love extending our games with new capabilities. So right when 3D Touch was introduced and we got our hands on the new iPhones, we started wondering: How to make use of it? Can it make our projects even better? And thus began the brainstorm 🌩

Hey, what if we save that direct manipulation feeling and introduce speed control with the pressure from 3D Touch? It seemed a perfect fit as soon as we thought of it. The implementation and migration of previous controls to 3D Touch only took a couple of hours, since new iOS APIs are mostly well thought out. After some sensitivity adjustments we were pretty confident that it was the right way. It felt totally at place and Finger Hero became a much better game with controls which are natural and provide a native platform experience. Once you come up with something new and it feels so right that everyone else says it’s obvious and anybody would have thought of it, you know you’re doing it right.

Being innovative in a mobile game

With 3D Touch direct manipulation we’ve introduced something that had never been done in a game before. Each time you do such thing, you need to show it and explain it to your users. You need a tutorial, so players become familiar with the new way of interaction. It turned out to be the hardest thing in Finger Hero — to make the tutorial perfect. But that’s a story for another time.

Finger Hero on the App Store

Finger Hero was released on the App Store on March 31st earlier this year. We got lots of great feedback, especially from users that can take advantage of 3D Touch features ✌️ You can download Finger Hero here. I hope you love it as much as we do 😁

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