One of the most interesting challenges of creating games for a platform like the iPhone is figuring out a control scheme that really works. Ideally the controls should be completely natural to players so that the learning curve is as low as possible and players can spend more time playing, and less time learning.

The catch is that the iPhone is such a new platform there are no established standards for how to interact with the game. There is no thumbstick or arrow keys that people are used to using, and there's no A or B buttons to press.

While we have some good ideas on what might work well, we ultimately have to just test things out a bit and see what feels the best, and what just doesn't feel right at all. Today I'm going to talk about the basic player movement and next time I'll talk about trick execution.

Movement in a 3D game is actually pretty tricky since most people have issues (whether they want to admit it or not) in easily navigating and understanding 3D worlds. We knew that we wanted the movement to be accelerometer based but had to work to find something that was intuitive enough.

Our first attempt was an over the shoulder camera view. This actually worked out fairly well but it got a bit confusing as you came back into the pool and the camera flipped around quickly. You might think that you were going left but you ended up going right because of this.

Next we tried keeping the over the shoulder view but fixing the controls so that a tilt up on the phone always took you "North" in the pool and tilting left always took you "West", etc. We found that this worked great for experienced gamers, but got very confusing for casual players as you'd often times end up tilting left to go West, but moving right on the screen because of the direction you were traveling.

At this point we decided to drop the over the shoulder camera view for a bit and see if we could get a top down or isometric camera to work.

Sometimes it's great getting to develop for such a diverse set of games as we get to here at Fuel. Obviously one of our biggest iPhone projects right now is the Vans skateboarding game (just a couple more days to help us name the game), but it's far from the only thing we've been doing.

Our team in Ottawa just wrapped up development for our first All Girl Arcade iPhone games - Sushi Toss. This is one of the more popular All Girl Arcade games and it was the most obvious choice to port over to the iPhone. The premise is simple, you just need to toss the Sushi from the chef up to Jessy, by flipping your iPhone up. The challenge comes from needing to time the tosses right to hit each of the moving plates on the way up.

Perhaps the best feature is that Sushi Toss ties into your user account at All Girl Arcade so you can still earn gems while you play!

We'll be posting a bit more on this in the next few days and it should hit the App Store just as soon as Apple gives it the thumbs up.