What separates great touch controls from frustrating ones

I've thrown more phones onto soft furniture than I'd like to admit, usually because a game fumbled a simple tap. Good touch controls are invisible — you stop thinking about them. Bad ones become the whole experience.

The best designs give you big, forgiving hit areas and clear feedback. Nitro Canyon nails this: its drift button is huge and the car responds the instant you press. Compare that to games where you miss a 20-pixel target and lose the race, and the gap is obvious.

Radial menus are underrated. Iron Meridian keeps a dozen commands two taps away without cluttering the screen, which is remarkable for a strategy game on a phone.

If you're a developer reading this: test your controls one-handed, on a bus, with cold hands. That's the real world your game lives in.