Core Mechanics

The dual virtual joystick proved to be quite a problem to solve. We tried many different set ups

At first I placed the direction and fire buttons at the bottom. When I held an ipad, however, I thought they might be too low, and it might be too easy for the ipad to tip over. So we placed them on the sides. 

We iterated a lot on the dual joystick, these are some of the options we tried:

• Left joystick moves the shape, right joystick rotates gun
• Left joystick moves and rotates. 
• buttons fired continuously, when pressed
• touching a shape on the screen fired the button
• constant speed vs. no constant speed

We tried a lot of configurations, and tested them extensively with people. Most of them seemed very difficult and unintuitive to use. 

This is a game that works really well with an xbox controller, but not as well as the tablet like we had thought.

It was difficult to test whether or not the game was fun until we got the controls working right. Eventually we removed all the mazes and walls for the first ten levels and that took away a lot of the player frustration.

Skyler did a ton of work on the controls, with a lot of back and forth, I think we eventually landed on something that works.