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DEV BLOG #1 - Unit Placement View

22K View2022-11-11

Hi wobblers!

This is the dev team of TABS Mobile and we have something to announce today:

In the following few months, we will release a series of TABS DEV BLOGs on a regular basis to share with you the design and ideas of the pocket edition during the porting process 🛠️

While these features under development are not the final version, we hope to take this opportunity of introducing the mobile content to communicate our design ideas and get to know your voice. Our goal has always been to strive to provide the same gaming experience of the original PC game but to mobile devices.

Then without further ado, let's first talk about the in-dev design of the unit deployment view in the pocket edition.

Switch the Placement View

As you know in the PC version of TABS, when players place units on maps, by clicking the F key, the free cam opens by default, switching the view from a top-down god-like perspective to a 360-degree free perspective without display of any menus or buttons, and allowing you to explore and access every corner of the map in all directions.

While in TABS Mobile, in order to achieve a seamless switch between the top-down deployment perspective and the free observation perspective, we added in the upper left corner of the screen a “free cam” button by clicking which the placement UI will all disappear. And when double-tapping on screen again it will switch back to the top-down placement interface.

When it comes to the free cam mode, the first issue we encountered is about controls:

Unlike the top-down placement view, the free cam mode ideally should allow the player to control the camera movement and angle at the same time.

If zooming in & out and adjusting the camera angle only by swiping your left and right fingers on screen, the controls wouldn’t be convenient enough to create a smooth long shot.

Therefore, we added a left-hand virtual joystick in the free cam mode to control the “WASD” movement of the camera, while allowed players swipe on the middle-right screen to adjust the camera angle and horizontal movement.

In this way, players can freely and smoothly control the camera to achieve some cool “one shots”, observing the googly eyes of wobblers closely, or easily unlock some hidden “easter eggs” on maps.

That’s all for today’s sharing on unit placement view! If you have any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to join our official Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/tabsmobile

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