Indeed, an on-screen dpad with the other hand casting would be great. Maybe you could have a bar with icons for different stuff on the right side of the screen (sound, pause, spells, aforementioned summoning, ...). This would occupy only a small space, but still necessary because if the screensize is 18x9. The screen ratio on most phones at that resolution is not 2:1 however, more often 5:2 or similar.

Perhaps the active wizard could be summoned with a small shake however. Or you could equip the GMG, if implemented, with that(since when summoning the wizard you may want to target it at a certain area)(then again, MR2 style was just fine).

Only problem. Touchscreen D-Pads stink.

Hey now.

I've been working on one which I think works quite nicely. (it keeps getting better and better)
It shouldn't be much to move it over.

(I'll put up my c# code if you'd like to see how it works)

I didn't mean to diss yours. I'vs never used one I liked.

Hopefully, you'll be the first!

lol.

I've done a fair bit of testing at this point:P

I've been brainstorming ideas for controls on another suggestion (regarding the simple creation of MR mobile and was only just made aware of this thread. Here is the link to the other suggestion if you want to see how these ideas developed. [Suggestion_6992]
I was mainly helped by ♪ with the ideas and megaman4ever pointed this tread out.

The main points we came up with was to use a dpad (I referenced the ones used in the iPhone app games Solomon's Keep and Solomon's Boneyard. They are the smoothest I have ever found. Second was to use a touch-and-drag-anywhere system to move a crosshairs around the screen. Hold to charge the spell, move your finger to move the hairs in that direction, release to fire. The key detail here is that the hairs are not by default set to move under your finger, but in parallel with it (there could be an option to set the hairs to jump to your finger instantly, depending on a person's preference).

Two details of functionality I suggested near the end were
"The crosshairs should be bright red and about the size of Merlin himself to help with visibility"

and

"Whenever you double tap the screen, the hairs double in size and blink for a second to help you locate them. When you tap on the Merlin control stick have a large ed exclamation point appear above his head and blink for a second. These would be fast and simple fixes for the "I can't find Merlin/cursor/crosshairs but my health bar is dropping like a rock!" moments we all *love* (twitch)."

What do you think?

I think that's what I'm going to go with.

I think that for the mouse styled effect, that we should maybe go on the exponential movements type of thing. We (I) could research exactly how mouse input is read, and emulate that, so the "mouse" can be moved around precisely, without needing large movements.

I've been brainstorming some iras for control options for the game, and I've thought of a number of "switches" people could flip in some menu or other.

1 Left hand vs. Right hand (switch which side the movement stick is on)
2 Vector controlled crosshairs (what we've been talking about) vs. Touch to shoot right there
3 "Control flop" => switches purpose of stick and touch (touch to move Merlin, stick to move hairs, hold to charge, release to fire)

I'm sure you could think of more to add or improvements you could make of these.

!!!

I've thought of a problem!

How are we going to ensure that the person isn't trying to release their energy blast when they are scrolling the crosshairs around?

Maybe do a double tap to shoot?

As long as they're holding, they're charging. This means they might have to plan out when and where they want to fire the shot. With the number of enemies on an ordinary screen, it should't be too difficult finding a target to shoot at. One side effect is that if they want to move the hairs around, they would end up shooting a bolt of some size or other.

Double tapping wouldn't work becaues of the sheer number of shots a person has to fire in rappid sucession. I think lag or would cause problems, either that or it would increase the probability that the device would fail to detect some touch or other and the player would get frustrated. To fire just pick up your finger. To keep moving the hairs just touch and keep on dragging.

Oooo! One possible solution, you carge by holding down the "Merlin move" stick and fire by releasing it! This allows one finger to do nothing but aim, while the only side effects are momentary hessitations in Merlin's movements and continual charging while trying to escape from a tight corner. In the first case, the side effect could be solved by giving Merlin momentum only when you release the movement stick. Make him slide one more "tile" in the direction he was moving (no momentum while moving to prevent a need for oversteering Merlin). The second side effect is not particularly problematic because a large fully charged bolt is more useful in an escape than a series of smaller weaker ones with less push-back. Besides, I often found myself ignoring aiming while in those situations and merely holding down the mouse button on the computer anyway, it gave me a more clear idea of where Merlin was because there was always a bright yellow ball over his head.

I think I like the last one the best:)

as far as keeping merlin moving, I could easily have him decelerate to stop, rather than stop immediately.

I think I will still prefer to have Merlin shoot where my finger is, without any crosshair scrolling.

But I dunno, it has the obvious flaws, and other people probably prefer others.

meh. We'll see what works the best when we get there.

@ Megaman4ever
That is why I suggested the second of the switches for the option menu. I know there will be people who prefer to shot with their finger and avoid the cross-hair scrolling problem, especially if they're using a larger screen device like the iPad. I think the ability to switch between methods should be included.

Another option I thought of, not strictly control related though, is a colorblind switch to convert the graphics into greyscale. Would this be difficult to implement or not?

The case of tablets is pretty interesting:)

As for greyscale, may I ask why?

Also, the realm of its possibility depends on opengl es. I have no clue... yet.

I haven't seen many apps (can't remember one) that tailored to blind people, and yet I have seen comments from people complaining that their partial colorblindness prevents them from detecting things in the game that would allow them to improve/succeed/enjoy the game. I just thought that it wouldn't be too hard to make this an option, and people would probably comment on it.

It might require simplifying a few of the graphics, but that would reduce lag on some devices and might lead some players to use it just to beat some screen where the lag of too many explosions gets to be a problem.

Mainly? It's unique and I think it would be appreciated.

As far as I know, drawing in colour is the same speed as drawing black and white.(I might be wrong about that)

I think that a black and white version would require either a lot of extra computation in turning the colour of each image to B/W, or a lot of work on our part converting all the images to B/W and including a second set of the images, which would make the game much bigger.

Instead, we could make an entire version which is black and white?

Maybe we could have the full colour version cost money, while the b/w would be free lol
Now with 20% more colour!

On the other hand, all of our images do have little black outlines already, so maybe this is solving a problem which might not exist?