Pro Pinball

How do you plan on doing the nudging for mobile?
Will there be an option for accelerometer based nudging, or will it all be touch based?
If it is all touch based how will the touch zones be set up, will they be visible, will it just be 2 way nudging, will there be forward nudges, will the zones be assignable, will they only be at the top of the screen ala zen etc.

The plan is to support both methods. For the touch screen, my preferred method is to use dragging to control the nudge as it gives you full control (it's what we did with Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon), but we can look to support region based nudging if we can find a nice way to nudge in all three directions like the original version.

Dragging has the drawback that, at least for my sloppy in the heat of the action, touch-clicks get misinterpreted as drags and nudge the table instead of flipping the flipper. That's very annoying.
Nudging by accelerometer has the drawback that no manufacturer is required to build the sensor into their device which means sensor quality and availability varies.
Please consider a dead-zone for nudging by shaking.
The drawback of regions is that they require screen-space and lack precission. Flippers, launch ball, nudging, magno save... as for precission maybe define zones in zones or a gradient of intensity to simulate nudge power.

I agree that drag/swipe nudging can be rather dodgy and something like trapping a ball can lead to an accidental nudge.

I am a fan of having optional visible touch zone mapping with several touch zone options like in The Pinball Arcade. With the visible touch zones there is 5 way nudging available for touch nudging, and 2 way nudges with shake/accelerometer nudging.

Shake nudging is in some ways very intuitive but very dependent on the hardware, and the accelerometer seems to be one component that is cost cut, which makes coding a reliable feature for it difficult no doubt.

If you support external controllers (such as Gametel as I mentioned in another topic), then you can have the shoulder buttons for flippers and the face buttons for nudging which would be the best solution on a phone I believe.

As for touch-only with no external controls, there really is no optimal solution. If you go with touch-zones then they would need to be invisible to avoid the table being obstructed, and it would end up being sloppy. If you use dragging then I can see a lot of accidental nudges happening which would make me quit in frustration after a few unintended Tilts.

The best solution (but still not optimal) is the accelerometer nudging, but then you have to be careful to not make it too sensitive, no-one can hold a phone completely motionless while gaming and more accidental nudges and Tilts could be a result. And for those who don't have accelerometers built-in (like my Tablet) this still would not work.

Since most new devices support Bluetooth and USB controllers, this is still the preferred option in my opinion.

I also think that on devices that support it the accelerometer - especially on phones havin touch zones quickly clutters the screen space and quickly having to reposition the fingers to nudge can easily result in throwing around the phone.

'The Pinball Arcade' have a great touch input system, this works as follows...

They have 5 direction nudging, and also adjustable touch nudging zones ie different scheme's the user can select which control what areas of the screen do what and what size the touch zones are.
They also have a toggle which allows a touch zone to be graphically visible during play via a translucent boundary box.

Scheme A - with zone visibility switched on.

This has 3 areas on the bottom row which are Left Flip / Nudge up / Right flip.
The middle row has 4 zones -Left Nudge / Up Left nudge / Up right nudge / Right Nudge.
The zone visibility toggle is on in this clip, and the boundary zones are identified with translucent frame as can be seen.


Or Scheme E - with zone visibility switched on.

Same zones as Scheme A but the flipper area is smaller vertically meaning your thumbs have less distance to move for nudging - great for tablets.

There are 5 different scheme's currently.

This makes a massive difference to control of play using touchscreen inputs.

Any chance you could shamelessly copy this for Android?