I just played through 10 Fantasy Fights on the iPad. Fixed a few little bugs on the way, but you can win the game, as this screenshot proves:



Only problem is, the interface is still a ported-over mouse interface, not a touch interface. So, it's pretty painful to go all the way through. Next big task is to make touch work the way it should.

Having just played, the things that really stand out are:

* 10FF is pausable real-time. It's more of a tactical game than action, so being able to pause and issue orders is really important. On the PC, this works great with spacebar. On the iPad, with no spacebar, the tiny little pause button is not nearly enough. I'll definitely make pause easier to hit, but also experiment with pausing whenever you select one of your characters, or even an auto-pause feature.
* For things like inventory and stores, I use drag and drop to move stuff around. Also, scroll bars when you have too much stuff. However, I'm going to have to make the scrollable stuff drag to scroll, as that's how touch interfaces work. What happens to the drag and drop of objects? Do I try to detect what the player is doing? Switch to "click the object", "click the destination"? Or what?
* Organizing your party right now requires clicking on tiny little buttons. Doesn't work at all.
* I was worried about hit detection on characters and monsters, but it actually works pretty well.
* On the PC, I have hover, which is useful. Currently, as a workaround, you can generally pause and then click on something to get info, but this also triggers actions. So, I need to make this better for touch.
* On the PC I use r-click to enter an info dialog for just about everything. I switched to long-press for iPad, which is OK. However, there are a lot of places where a tap could just do that too. Also, the UI needs some indication when you've held long enough when there is different behavior.

There's more, but enough to worry about now. My next plan is to sit down with all of the screen and figure out exactly what the behavior should be. Then try it out, and iterate until it is awesome.

Geoff