Val:

“

Guardian of Light is a fast-paced game, and the trickiest part of the control design was ensuring players can comfortably move, aim and shoot, all at the same time.

That might sound simple enough, and on Switch, the double Joycons and trigger buttons accommodate this well. On mobile, however, the lack of physical buttons and the natural grip people hold phones and tablets in makes it tricky to introduce a third button for shooting!

We came up with four possible solutions to this problem, prototyping, testing and iterating on each one:

Option 1: Shoot Button

The first option that came to mind was the most obvious: match gamepad controls and have a Shoot button, separate from the analogue sticks. Although this works well for some games such as Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal, it’s not ideal for Guardian of Light’s twin-stick shooting, as players would be forced to stop aiming in order to shoot.

Option 2: Fire-at-will

The second option we considered a fire-at-will mechanic. When the player has a finger on the right analogue to aim in a specific direction and an enemy is in range, Lara starts firing automatically.

This approach makes the ergonomics more comfortable, but in testing, we found ourselves frequently running out of ammo!

Option 3: Tap to Shoot

We also considered an alternative to fire-at-will where tapping-and-holding on any on-screen enemy opens fire.

This solves the ergonomics and ammo conservation issue, but Guardian of Light is an arcade-inspired dual-stick shooter, and this control scheme doesn’t recreate that experience well.

Option 4: Three-stage Right-stick

Our ultimate solution solved all the above issues while maintaining that arcade-inspired feel. We implemented a multi-stage right analogue stick, triggering different actions depending on three different states:

State 1

The button on-screen, very faint.

This alerts the player to its presence without being a distraction.

State 2

Slightly pushing the analogue in any direction.

Lara aims in the indicated direction, but does not fire.

State 3

Pushing the analogue further, past a point which is indicated by haptic feedback.

Lara aims and fires in the desired direction continuously. Aim direction can be adjusted at any time to preserve the twin-stick style control.

This proved to be the best solution, but required a lot of tuning to make it feel as smooth and reactive as possible!

Gestures and Context-Sensitive Buttons

Limited screen space is another challenge to overcome during the design stage of mobile ports.

Some devices have extremely small screens and having too many buttons on-screen can overwhelm players, especially in fast-paced games like Guardian of Light. Having as few buttons as possible, and laying them out ergonomically is key to the experience.

In this instance, we’ve combined two solutions to deliver intuitive controls that are conveniently placed:

Gestures

Rather than forcing players to tap small, semi-transparent buttons when performing time-sensitive actions such as jumping and dodge-rolling, we map them to touch-screen gestures which any phone user will be familiar with. Simply swipe anywhere on the screen to dodge-roll, and tap anywhere on the screen (that isn’t a button!) to jump.

The result is intuitive controls and more screen space to admire Guardian of Light’s beautiful level designs — but players can also add traditional buttons for these actions in the options menu if they prefer!

Context-Sensitive Buttons

A combination of two-stage art for buttons (for example, planting and detonating bombs) and context or location-specific prompts and buttons make up the other half of the approach. These save screen space by appearing only when required, and guide players as to what actions are possible at their current position.

”

Edwin:

“

One thing we are constantly battling against is that mobile, and especially Android, has a very fragmented population of devices There’s a huge variety of hardware, and many manufacturers use customised versions of Android which use different graphics drivers. So testing and supporting a wide range of devices is a very involved process! We don’t take the decision to block a device lightly. However, we believe that the games we release deserve to be seen and played at their best, and so we’d rather block devices that can’t run a game well, rather than disappoint players.

We love the huge choice of phones and tablets, but it certainly keeps our designers, developers and QA team busy when it comes to supporting them!

”

So there you have it. Porting existing games to new platforms might seem like a simple case of just ‘making it run on new hardware’, but every project brings its own unique challenges. We hope you’ve enjoyed this peek behind the scenes!

The Lara Croft Collection is available now for Nintendo Switch, including both Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light swings onto iOS & Android on February 27th for for $9.99/€8.99/£7.49. Pre-order on iOS or pre-register on Android today!