Last time I wrote about the various ways we let the player move around the pool environment. While that is the most fundamental aspect of playing the game, it's something that should just work without the players having to think about it. In contrast performing tricks should not only work but should "feel" right as you do them, and should be fun to do. Again we tried several different things and ideas, and the screenshot above shows part of what we finalized on.

One of the exciting, and challenging aspects of an iPhone is that there's no buttons available for the player to press. While we could put artificial buttons on the screen that feels artificial. It doesn't make sense for the platform and we feel should be avoided wherever possible.

Without buttons we still have fingers and accelerometer input which we can key off of, thus our first test was the simplest. When the player was in the air you would tap to perform a trick. This actually worked incredibly well, with just one problem: you lose a lot of player control. We could either give the players just one trick to perform (boring) or we could automatically choose a trick based on where they are in the pool or something (also boring). We needed a way to let the player have more control over what move they could do.

We had been thinking about "swipes" as input for a while and decided to try out a system of swipe input where the player would perform a series of swipes while on the ground, and their trick would then be performed when they jumped into the air. Again this worked out fairly well except that as a player you did all of your playing while in the pool, but had to simply watch when you got into the air.

Ultimately we settled on a system where the user swipes their finger while in the air to perform a trick. This means our swipes are much simpler than the previous method (simply swipe up, down, left or right to perform a trick) but the system is a lot of fun to play and provides the right balance of immediate gratification for user input. We also still have harder moves that involve swiping two fingers at a time, for instance swiping one finger up while swiping another finger right.

After we got the air tricks sorted out we tried out grinds, and based on our initial tests with air tricks we found the grinds to be very straightforward. When you want to grind you simply press and hold two fingers on the screen when going up the side of the pool. When you reach the lip you'll start to grind and you'll need to tilt the iPhone left and right to maintain balance and bailing.

The latest addition to the controls was adding in the "swipe indicator" that you can see in the screenshot. This shows what type of swipe you just did giving visual feedback to the player in addition to the actual trick being performed.