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"We've seen all kinds of gaming genres make the move to mobile, first-person shooters chief among them. But anyone who has tried playing one on a tablet knows it can be frustrating to navigate with gestures in a game world created around a keyboard and a mouse.\nBen Cousins of Scattered Entertainment thinks he has a solution for tricky tablet controls. His upcoming mobile game The Drowning is a horror-shooter hybrid; the world is being infected by terrifying reanimated creatures that gain their power from oil spills. The game is set some time after the main events of this apocalypse, and so the only people who remain are scavengers able to survive off the scraps. The game's protagonist is one such person, who happens to have an affinity for building weapons out of nothing.\nA former EA studio general manager, Cousins says first-person shooters are gaming's most lucrative genre; therefore, they definitely need a smooth transition to tablet.\n\"There's something about a shooter on tablet works really well,\" he says. \"Having that high-resolution screen close to your face reminds me of playing DOOM in 1992. But this virtual joystick system really doesn't work. I think the mistake with the sticks is they are trying to ape other console controls.\"\nCousin's ideas for tablet games are simple: It should be easy to hold your tablet in one hand while playing with the other. With that in mind, he says the development team at Shattered Entertainment have come up with controls they predict will be easy for anyone to use.\nPlayers can tap anywhere on the screen to move to that location, Cousins says, similar to the control structure in games like Diablo III. To fire their weapons, players tap with two fingers. The bullet targets to the middle of those two touchpoints. Navigate the world with simple swipe gestures. \n\"We showed it to Apple and they were pleased. They said it's how they would would design the shooter,\" Cousins says.\nFor a player to cozy up to new controls, the introductory game has to present the modifications in the best light. Cousins says having enemies who don't fire back is important, at least until players can get used to the accuracy of shooting with two fingers.\n\"Zombies enabled us to set the world in a much more realistic, modern setting. But we realized the George Romero formula had been done too much, and we didn't want to see a guy in a business suit as zombie another time,\" Cousins says.\nHe adds, the infected creatures in The Drowning act more like rabid dogs or crazed primates than traditional zombies. Their goals are to drag helpless victims into the infected oil, converting them to monsters.\nThe Drowning will be out for both iOS and Android some time in the first quarter of the year, according to Cousins.\nUPDATE: Scattered Entertainment released a video of Cousins demonstrating the controls. Check it out below. \n\nImage courtesy of Scattered Entertainment\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/01/23/the-drowning/>