Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design

Chapter 8: DoodleCat

Learn the rules in drawing and perspective. It is an absolute must, even for the abstract artist, to learn the rules before perfecting a personal style

—William Band

There are no rules, only tools

—Glenn Vilppu

An artist is only as good as his tools

—Someone

Crud. I guess artists can’t agree on anything . . . except that you need to have good tools if you are going to make good art. Heck, you need good tools even if you are going to make bad art—especially if you are going to design a game for a player to make bad art (or good art) while playing a touchscreen drawing game. Before touchscreens, drawing in video games was mostly pretty crummy1. You either drew using a game controller, which was about as easy to use as those little knobs on an Etch-A-Sketch, or with a mouse, which was like drawing by remote control with a bar of soap. Even if you owned a thousands-of-dollars CAD tool, drawing in games was no fun2. Without simple and intuitive drawing tools, you risk creating not only bad art but also creating a bad game. Let’s create some good drawing tools instead!

Get to the Point

The Nintendo DS took the stylus from the CAD artists and put it into the hands of the players. It was an inspired idea, but this stylus/controller combination still had a few disadvantages: Players had to juggle between using the stylus and the D-pad and button controls. Balancing ...