Deep Dive: Creating the touch controls for Descenders on mobile

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as UI and difficulty levels in Cook Serve Forever, the challenges of programming for 2D for Sweet Transit, physics-based animation in Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and designing spatial inventories in dark fishing sim Dredge. In this edition, Matthew Chovan, solo developer on Mind Palace explores the design and technical creation of impossible spaces in an M.C. Escher-inspired game jam game.

I’m Jay Fernandes, the director for Plastic Fern Studios, which is a fully remote game studio founded in 2018. I’ve been in the video game industry for almost 14 years and have worked on games for mobile, to indie, to AAA and have (for almost the past 8 years) worked with many developers on porting, QA, release management, and even SFX or music. Some projects I’ve been a part of in recent years include Hades, Superliminal, SkateBIRD, Firewatch, the Playdate console, Escape Academy, and the mobile ports for Descenders (I probably have close to 100 games I’ve helped with in some capacity at this point).

The main contributors to the touch controls and how they currently work were:

Sunder Iyer -- UI/UX Programmer for Plastic Fern Studios. Previously at AAA studios and worked on South Park The Fractured But Whole and The Sims 4. Came up with various input schemes and produced mockups, documents, and iconography. Also playtested and provided feedback along with Jay given that both of us have UX backgrounds.

Bryan Alvarado – Friend of Jay’s for as long time and