On creating a native real-time-strategy game user interface for multi-touch devices

Abstract

Historically, real-time strategy video games, such as Star-craft (1999) and Command and Conquer (1995), were intended to be played on desktop or laptop computers, with interfaces that afford the user dozens of keys and key combinations, mouse gestures including clicking and dragging, and several mouse buttons to further complicate the interface while allowing customization and a wide range of possibilities to the user. On a mobile multi-touch platform, there are constraints of limited visual real estate, which is actually shared with the touch command interface. Though work has been done to port real-time strategy games to the mobile platform, to date, there has not been a significant effort to enhance the usability of these interfaces by removing redundancies and tailoring the game commands to these multi-touch devices. The touch interface presents unique challenges as there are touches and gestures rather than buttons and key combinations. In this paper, we present a rapidly-prototyped user-centered design in a ten-week project of a real-time strategy user interface native for the iPad. As the user's experience is key in creating a robust and intuitive interface, we incorporate the user's feedback in several stages of the design and prototyping of the project. We show changes to the design of the user interface over several iterations and, finally, show a prototype of the user interface system using a game of our own design as a test platform. The contributions of this project are the interface designed for a new mode of interaction (i.e., the iPad platform), the bubble menu, and the ability to cancel orders.