I’m increasingly of the opinion that onscreen buttons are not the way forward. Overlays are a poor substitute for a physical d-pad or buttons; it’s too easy for fingers to drift while attention is focused elsewhere onscreen or to obstruct immediate threats to the player resulting in unfair deaths.

Yep. The best games are the ones that fully embrace the constraints (and advantages) of the touch screen rather than porting existing games and mapping physical buttons to virtual. Shaun has the right idea, and so do many other independent game makers. It’s not an accident iOS devices are becoming the most popular gaming devices on the planet.

Canvas has significant room for improvement but is already capable of producing games normal people can’t distinguish from Flash, the only game in town as recently as a year ago.

Update: Z-Type is made with HTML5 using the Impact game engine. It’s so slick I didn’t even notice when I was playing it wasn’t Flash.

Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away.

Integrating Facebook, not merely as a shortcut for player accounts (which, truthfully, would now be better served by Game Center) but as a fully-featured alternate opportunity to play the game² is brilliant. It expands the base of players and provides convenient access when away from the phone.

Whether due to EA’s implementation or Facebook’s API, however, staying logged in is an exercise in futility.³ Prepare to be bewildered as time after time launching Scrabble will reveal, if it doesn’t crash first, no available games — the telltale sign you’ve been mysteriously and obnoxiously logged out. For those practicing good password hygiene it’s a particularly frustrating experience. Each new login means launching a separate password database, going through that rigamarole, returning to Scrabble, typing your email address, pasting in the password, and finally, submitting your login credentials for authorization. Facebook (helpfully?) emails you immediately to notify you that a new device has logged in.⁴

Speaking of notifications, the cherry on the fail sundae is the (logical) lack of push notifications while you’re logged out. Have fun playing an asynchronous, turn-based game when your phone never bothers to let you know it’s your move. The Schrödinger login flaw alone might persuade you that Words with Friends is more deserving of your money, your attention, and, critically, your word of mouth. I certainly wouldn’t blame you.⁵

Design oversights, perhaps.

Compared to the Facebook login Hindenburg, the remaining UI conflagrations pale.

In the full-board view, tiles are missing point values. I suspect this is a deliberate decision intended to reduce clutter, but it’s a painful loss. Thankfully, zooming in reveals them, yet unless you’re intimately familiar with Scrabble, that’s going to result in a lot of unnecessary taps. Even those who can recite the tile values from memory⁶ will be noticeably inconvenienced. Chalk one up for Words with Friends on this point.

Superfluous dialogs. Want to view a game in which it’s not your turn? Be prepared to be assaulted by a warning that it’s not actually your turn. Every time. Want to jump from the current game to another? The only list is in the main menu, which wouldn’t be so bad if accessing the main menu was a one-tap affair from within a game. The good news is, that’s pretty much it. The bad news is you’ll hit those frequently enough to notice. Once you do, well, sorry for Goldbluming you.⁷

Don’t bother re-arranging those tiles. It should go without saying that re-arranging the tiles on your rack is half the battle in forming successful plays. That Scrabble on the iPhone abandons all pretense of re-arranging the tiles as you move them is a staggering failure, especially in light (yes, again) Words with Friends’ excellence in the identical area. In Scrabble, dragging a tile across the rack has no effect on the other tiles. Dropping it will snap everything into their new, updated locations — most of the time. Miss by a few pixels though and the dragged tile will simply revert to its original position, leaving you berating the UI rather than playing the game. Words with Friends, on the other hand, smoothly juggles the rack as you pass the designated tile across, providing constant and immediate feedback each step of the way. It’s a luxurious experience when contrasted with Scrabble’s feckless disinterest in even making the attempt.

Scrabble with Friends

If the situation were reversed, if Words with Friends was the original and Scrabble the clone, I suspect I’d have difficulty selecting EA’s offering despite its merit. It’s snappy, slick, and clever in all the ways Words with Friends isn’t. Its Facebook integration enables games with friends (ha) I’d be otherwise unable to engage.

Conversely, Words with Friends can on occasion feel slow, it exhibits surprising bugs, and overall exudes a crude amateurism in contrast to Scrabble’s sophistication. Frankly, it’s a toss-up. For now, I’m tipping the scales in Scrabble’s direction thanks to an as yet unrevealed ace: balance. The Words with Friends board is overpowered. There are too many word multipliers and many letters have higher point values, enabling luck and randomness to outweigh skill. Similarly, Scrabble’s 50 point bingos reward wordsmithing to a greater degree than does the comparatively paltry 35 allotted by Words with Friends.

Executive summary: if EA doesn’t address the login situation in Scrabble, it’s going to be difficult to justify the dog and pony show necessary merely to play. All the gloss and thoughtfulness means nothing when confronted with repeated blockades each time the app is launched. I therefore find myself frustrated; yet, I am, until further notice, a Scrabble man. I wish I could be optimistic that EA was on the ball.

1. Download the free version if you want to try before you buy. It’s essentially the same but ad-supported.
2. Yes, I’m aware the Facebook version preceded the iPhone version. RIP Scrabulous.
3. I’m inclined to fault EA on this as plenty of applications use Facebook to outsource logins without issue.
4. I have ten such emails in three days of playing.
5. In a slightly related but ultimately harmless vein, EA has also chosen to encourage you to pimp the application each time you best your highscore by posting it to your Facebook wall. It’s a duplicitous bit of marketing, camouflaged as the worst kind of thoughtless, self-promoting, push-button oversharing. </soapbox>
6. Count me doubly impressed if you can tick off tile distributions
7. I wanted to add a section here entitled “Egregious animations” for the frequent, tedious screen gyrations for scoring plays and shuffling tiles, but, I suppose, spartan interface is a personal preference to some degree. To each his own.

Tips & Tricks.

I’m the type of person who avoids reading reviews about movies and games lest they spoil my experience. But that’s me. Maybe you need a little help. Here’s what to do if you’re having trouble:

• Get stuck on purpose. As long as you’re stuck, you can’t get hit from above. Wait until a black balloon arrives, then shake to free yourself. You’ll make up all the ground that you were losing while you were stuck. Jump lightly a few times to convince the game you can’t get out.
• Keep stuff above you. A corollary to getting stuck on purpose, find a crack and duck underneath. Stuff falling from above you is, naturally, the most dangerous part of the game.
• Options are key. If you are out and about, don’t get trapped in a canyon. Try to stay on top of things so you can always move quickly left or right.
• Snag those power-ups. There are a crazy amount of extra lives and power-ups in this game. Make things easy on yourself and grab as many as you can. Those extra lives will come in handy.
• Get the helmet, but don’t use it. The helmet keeps you safe, but it destroys anything that falls on your head. You’ll need that stuff to get to the top, so try to avoid getting hit.

Modest Proposals.

A few minor tweaks that would make the game more challenging and user-friendly.

• Multiple simultaneous games. We’ve got at least two regular iPad users and several more guest users. The ability to have more than one game saved would be a boon.
• Saving progress mid-level. It seems odd that exiting to the main menu would reset your level progress, but that’s the way it is. Maybe just needs clarification.
• Difficulty meter. As is, The Incident is essentially a casual game for casual players. An easy way to amp up the difficulty would be removing or thinning the available power-ups. Another would be to increase the penalty for getting trapped. Make it tougher to use that protective bubble or impossible to avoid balloons while in it. Bottom line: The Incident is currently stuck on easy. Let’s see options for difficult and hard-core. It wouldn’t be difficult to add that setting to the menu and dial a few game properties up or down.

Last, kudos to these guys for creating a game that takes advantage of the iPhone’s native functionality rather than attempting to port a traditional style of gameplay. Shaking, tilting, and indiscriminate tapping are winning moves. The Incident might not have perfected iOS gaming, but it’s a shining example of how to do it right.

This strategy will fail and fail hard.

PC and phone games are fundamentally different. Multi-touch and point-and-click games require different dynamics, thought processes, and reflexes. Accelerometers and joysticks are not equally efficient means of moving your character around the screen. QVGA does not equal SXGA.

Phone and XBOX 360 games are not the same. Hand-held, tactile devices with tinny ear buds pale in comparison to the immersive experience of 52″ screens with 10′ interfaces, wireless controllers, and booming surround sound.

If game manufacturers expect to bolt on platform specific controls and reap the benefit of multiple purchases¹, they will find dissatisfied customers awaiting them—assuming they find any customers at all.

The fundamental lesson of the iPhone is that software needs to be built with the platform in mind from the ground up. Games that work on multiple platforms must be one of two types. Either they are like the popular game World of Goo, in which the mechanics of the game were carefully crafted to apply consistently across platforms², or the game has multiple components, each of which can only be completed by playing on the platform that makes sense. For example, a game might be a first-person shooter for the PC & XBOX 360 while allowing character creation, intelligence gathering, or some form of turn-based activity on the phone.³ Any game that violates this principle (like the Indiana Jones game demoed above) will not provide a compelling experience on at least one of the platforms.⁴

Can you play Texas Hold’em on your phone, PC, and XBOX 360? Maybe, but that’s not what Microsoft is betting will stem the Windows Mobile Phone Series 7 bloodletting.

1. You know this is what they’re thinking, right? “Wait, now I can sell the same game three times?”
2. Not available on the iPhone, perhaps because the game does not make sense on such a small screen. See also Canabalt for a game that can work well in any environment, in this case because of its simplicity.
3. Augmented reality tie in?
4. Probably all the platforms will suffer because of the limited attention to each and necessity of cross-platform compatibility.

Jono DiCarlo in “A Tutorial Level For the Internet“:

Developing Metroid must have been like developing any software based around a brilliant new idea. You, the developer, know this feature is hot stuff and can potentially change the way people interact with software. But the problem is that your users don’t know this feature exists, and if they did know, they wouldn’t know why it’s something they would want, or how to make best use of it. What do you do?

The first-time player of Metroid will most likely begin by doing what most video games have taught them to do: force their way rightward by any means they can.

The tiny tunnel on this screen is too small to enter, but it obviously goes somewhere. It is a conundrum. It taunts you.

The only solution is to go back to the start and this time, walk to the left. If you do so, you are immediately rewarded with the discovery of this glowing ball (for trivia buffs: it was called the “Morph Ball” in later games, but here it was called the “Maru Mari”.)

When you pick it up, you can then have Samus (your character) curl into a pillbug-like ball and roll along the floor, which lets you get through tiny tunnels like the one that stopped you before. You can now proceed with the next phase of the game.

Shigeru Miyamoto tells a similar story about designing Super Mario Bros.:

But if you avoid the first Goomba and then jump and hit a block above you, a mushroom will spring out and you’ll get a shock. But then you’ll see that it’s going to the right so you’ll think: “I’m safe! Something strange appeared but I’m okay!” But of course when it goes against a pipe up ahead, the mushroom will come back!

At that point, even if you panic and try to jump out of the way, you’ll hit the block above you. Then just at the instant where you accept that you’re done for, Mario will suddenly shake and grow bigger! You might not really know what’s just happened, but at the very least, you’ll realize that you haven’t lost the turn.