Game interface enhancement under smart-phone platform focused on touch-screen interaction

Abstract

Virtual game controllers are essential for specific game genres when the game contents are transplanted from various platforms into smart-phone platform. Virtual images are projected as game interface at the smart-phone output screen. Therefore, certain amount of space is necessarily abandoned for the controller interface projection. In addition, the functions of game contents are fundamentally restricted, thus eliciting the necessity of limited number of buttons. In this study, diverse types of interaction are researched that occur in between user and touch-screen, and adequate interactions for smart-phone game contents are extracted and analyzed. In addition, focus is placed on minimizing the number of controller buttons while embracing diverse functions at the contents level. Specifically, the study pointed out that previous virtual game controllers are a simple metaphor of traditional methods, thus limited to “tap” interaction. Analyzing fighting action game contents, tap interaction is enhanced by adding up “flick” and “multi-touch” interaction to diversify and enhance previous interaction value. Finally, a prototype is developed by ameliorating past interface and referring to intrinsic features of aforementioned types of interaction, followed by user evaluation. Previous questionnaire method is adjusted to the specific research purpose, and quantitative evaluation is conducted while recording and analyzing the user-log data of fifteen repetitive experiments. The results indicate that flick and multi-touch interaction methods are effective under smart-phone touch-screen environment beyond traditional tap-only. Furthermore, functions are maintained with minimum number of buttons while situation compatibility of user interaction is verified. It also shows that adding diverse types of interaction to the simple tap-only affords unique user experience of long-term interest and fun to the players that are beforehand restricted to the traditional tap-only. In g...