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SAN FRANCISCO – "The iPad is not an iPhone," says game designer Graeme Devine.
Well, that's obvious. It's the size of a book. and you can't call your mom with it (at least not out of the box). So why do so many game designers take iPhone games, increase the graphical fidelity, and drop them onto the tablet?
It's hard to blame game developers for taking the easy solution and porting existing content: After all, even this quick-and-dirty process has resulted in several great iPad games. And with the iPad's success far from preordained at the tablet's launch, it might have seemed irresponsible to sink too much time and effort into development for the platform last year.
But things are changing. Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads already, and that number is about to jump with the release of its second-generation tablet next week. With a beefier dual-core processor and a rumored bump in RAM, the next iPad should be even better for high-quality game experiences.
Will developers start creating games that truly take advantage of its unique strengths?
'Touch is the best game interface we have available today.'"Touch is the best game interface we have available today," said Devine at the Game Developers Conference here Tuesday, and the iPad is "the best gaming device on the planet." Devine, a game-design legend whose credits include the groundbreaking CD-ROM game The 7th Guest and Microsoft's Halo Wars, spent a year at Apple working on iOS games. He's since left the company to concentrate on his own titles, but he remains one of Apple's biggest evangelists in the gaming world.
In his talk at the annual developers' confab, Devine said that what makes the tablet experience so unique is its ability to create a certain kind of "reality."
The game Let's Create! Pottery HD opened Devine's eyes to how subtle elements could make iPad games feel real. The pottery-making game uses the iPad's accelerometer to move the background of the screen. Shift the position of the iPad and the game's background shifts to match it.
"That little tilt made it feel all the more real," Devine said.
Designing tablet games to take into account the way players will hold and manipulate the device is key, he said, and it's why he can't stand to see developers simply porting their iPhone games to iPad.
Epic Games' Infinity Blade for iOS isn't exclusive to iPad. The $7 sword-fighting game includes versions for both phone and tablet. Although the iPad version benefits from a few gameplay tweaks, the overarching design makes it well-suited for the bigger device.
"One of our core design philosophies was that the whole game had to be playable with one finger," said Donald Mustard, co-founder of Infinity Blade developer Chair Entertainment, in an interview with Wired.com at GDC. Players can cover up so much of the iPhone screen with their hands, he said, that Chair wanted to make sure they saw Infinity Blade's gorgeous graphics, which are rendered with Epic's Unreal Engine 3.
As it turned out, being able to play the game with one finger made it perfect for tablet play. Since players have to hold the heavier, larger iPad by cradling it in one hand, games are far more comfortable if they work one-handed.
'You know what the iPad doesn't come with? It doesn't come with a joystick.'"If you want people to be comfortable playing for more than 30 seconds, you have to think about how people hold the machine in their hands," said Devine.
Another Devine commandment that Mustard agreed with: Thou shalt not make a fake joystick on the screen.
"You know what the iPad doesn't come with? It doesn't come with a joystick. So why [would] you do that?" said Devine. Putting a virtual joystick on the screen, or otherwise designing a control scheme that emulates a traditional controller, is just telling the player that your game would be more fun on another console, he said.
"If your game would be fun with a controller, like really fun, you're making the wrong game," Mustard said in his GDC presentation.
See Also:- iPad's 10 Biggest, Baddest Games Reviewed
