Anyone doing anything cool yet?

[frostymoss]

I'm interested in hearing some feedback with the games you're all working on so far. UDK provides a lot of possibilities, to keep it blunt.

From a user experience/usability perspective, and the market research my company's conducted thus far, an interesting point that's come up is that just because people have purchases FPS games in the past, doesn't mean they will continue to this year; some of the people we've interviewed have found these kinds of games on the iPhone and iPad uncomfortable and frustrating (e.g.: an FPS on the iPad can actually become painful for some people after a little while).

We haven't collected enough data to compile any sort of report, so I don't have anything like that to share; we were just concerned with establishing some basic personas and scenarios for our primary demographic (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should try and learn about product design, testing, etc - even a basic skill set here can go a long way).

There's been threads about control schemes, etc, and I'm not necessarily interested in starting another. According to different aggregated sources, for example this infographic (http://appoftheday.com/infographic), it seems like there's a lot of demand for cheapo flash games, which you could probably figure out for yourself by checking the appstore. Providing a user experience with as few bugs is incredibly important, and the more advanced your application is, the more things it has that can bug and frustrate a user, causing them to leave a ****ty review.

I'm really hoping to see mobile gaming take off, and I'm really hoping since the UDK gives Joe Schmoe the technology to make things look really good really easily, the market will shift to provide more competitive 3d products (hopefully, the expected prices will raise accordingly).

So without releasing shovelware, what are some ideas you've been tossing around in terms of a user experience that is both intuitive/simple, and detailed/rich? We've been playing around with a lot of different concepts. My personal favorite has the user controlling a bird by tilting the device forward and backwards (flap the wings) and tilting the device to either side to steer.

The new Rage-HD game, for example, is a clever FPS. Movement throughout the game is already scripted, and the user can use the device to aim and fire; this is like a shooting game you'd find at an arcade. Personally, I found it lacking.

The good FPS games have the sticks, which even when done well, can be frustrating. FPShooters, as it turns out, may not be the best genre to develop. Side-scrollers seem to be easier to play more of. Isometric and 3rd person provide a lot of opportunities as well (e.g. rpgs).

I'd be happy to share the bird code after it's released, but I couldn't give an estimate of when. The problem we've run into is trying to figure out a good format for an action title (that meets some of our particular requirements, there's another aspect to our titles that I'm not allowed to talk about yet) because we already have quite a bit of money invested into this sort of content.

I think it's really important to stress usability and user experience development (not to mention testing and QA). As a community of developers, it's particularly important to our mutual success for us to have the UDK brand associated with quality titles - our audience will know that our games are developed with the UDK. Our audience won't necessarily grasp what the UDK is, however, they will be quick to attach a stigma to it. If they get used to paying 5 bucks for a UDK title that sucks, they'll probably just stop buying UDK titles due to availability of a similar product made with other tech...

If your product's innovative and popular, it will be imitated quickly, hence capitalism. Hopefully I won't have to give an introduction to game theory to convince people to start talking

p.s.: I'll clean up any typos after catching some zzz's