Double touch joysticks

Question

I am developing a mobile game where I need to control main character in any direction using touch analog joystick (https://pineight.com/mw/images/6/6f/Ipoc_dpad.png). It's ok but I also want my character to fire in any direction. Thus I am looking for best solution of control.

There are some variants, but no one is ok:

1. Target and fire by pointing finger to exact point of the screen (not comfortable, because player will need to hold device by one hand and use second hand to move over the whole device).

2. Fire to direction where the character moves. This case will limit characters' freedom on move and target. Not good.

3. Use second touch joystick (under opposite hand) to select fire direction - this variant looks better than previous two, however I still not sure how comfortable it will be. I've tried by myself and it looks a bit complex for me to follow both controls at the same time.

Did you saw any games achieving the same goal? What you can recommend?

Answer 1

I played such mobile game once, unfortunately I can't remember the name right now. However, there was a joystick in the bottom left corner for walking in any direction and another joystick in the bottom right for firing whereever you want to. This was easy to use, assuming you want to use landscape mode. The player has a clear view over the whole screen and can still have full freedom over movement and firing directions.

Technically, I would just put the screen in two halves, left and right. When detecting a touch, just do a quick check if left/right half is being touched and proceed with your joystick evaluation afterwards. As most devices allow multi-touch nowadays, take care of cheating-attempts (firing should be only possible in one direction at a time, even if two touches are detected on the firing-half of your screen).

Edit: Well I didn't expect that - randomly googling for "ios shooter monster" gave me just the right result: the games' name was "Monster shooter". Lucky day.