Over the past week, our team was able to playtest movement and collisions for Carrier. We came out of it with a better perspective on how, among other things, movement and physics ought to work.
Our initial plan was to calculate acceleration and speed based on the proximity of the user's finger to the helicopter. The user could move with precision when necessary, and move quickly if they needed to get away from something, or build up speed in order to throw an object.
In practice, what we found was that people always used the max acceleration (finger on the corner of the screen). We also got a lot of feedback from those same testers complaining about both the speed of the helicopter and the speed of the acceleration.
What seemed to be happening was that users expected the helicopter to almost disregard acceleration. I had expected them to mostly tap close to the helicopter and maintain a small speed with small accelerations, similar to how a rocketship might navigate through space with thrusters. With that in mind, if we slow down the maximum speed and raise acceleration, that may result in a better control scheme.
Additionally, since users are disregarding anything but the maximum amount of acceleration, our team has decided to move to a fixed acceleration, rather than one based on distance. This should lend itself more to predictable movement, and allow people to tap closer to the helicopter and use less motion to control it.
Our second playtest is in two weeks, where we'll test the revised physics out to see if there's been any improvement.
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