Problem solving: find the right amount of interaction
As the gameplay programmer, this is the problem that I focused on. We wanted to make the game fun, so we were trying to add complicated level design into the destory building gameplay. However, our gameplay was not fun nor satisfying while there was not much development time left. So I made 6 different interaction prototypes (tapping, holding and releasing, shaking the phone, swiping outward/inward and continuously tapping) and tested it with people, and got some interesting observation.
Destroy building gameplay was the main gameplay that people do in our game. Use Pokemon Go as reference, it was similar to throwing a poke-ball. Instead of making it complicated, the better way was to make it satisfying. Our original design was using tapping, but after playtesting we found people enjoy swiping so much, and they wanted to do so many different moves.
Based on this observation, we changed our game design to give more freedom to the player. The player can hold the building’s block and do whatever they want. Our final version was very satisfying.