The Nauts - Ahto Edition at Mac App Store analyse

"The Nauts - Ahto Edition" includes the classic mode of the game “The Nauts" as well as the (to my knowledge) first promo game for a custom iOS keyboard extension. The name for the latter is Ahto and you can find it right here on the AppStore. The game puts you in control of three nauts, concurrently. They fly around in a single screen scene and your job is it to avoid colliding with each other. To do this you can fire a nauts thruster by tapping the naut. You collect stars along the way to increase your score. Classic mode offers additional challenges in form of targets which you can hit with your nauts to gain extra points. GameCenter Leaderboards are shared between the original and this Ahto Edition, by the way (-; For the two Ahto game modes, tapping a naut’ is replaced by ‘typing the letter’ shown above a nauts head. The goal here is to learn the key combinations needed to enter a letter with Ahto. ‘Key combinations’?? Yes, you sometimes need multiple keys to enter a single letter. Ahto only has eight of ‘em keys, though. Why? Well, the aim is to provide one button for each pinky, ring, middle and index finger. On iPad and in landscape, that is. Fingers are to be placed over the keys and to either touch the surface or not. Once memorised, this method removes the need to re-position your fingers when typing. For our 26 letter long alphabet, a maximum of three parallel taps is enough. ‘What happens in portrait mode or on iPhones?’, you might ask. For these cases of ‘thumb usage’, Ahto provides additional buttons. Called ‘combine buttons’, they press the two adjacent main buttons when tapped. This reduces the maximum number of parallel taps to a thumbs-friendly two. If keys have to be tapped in parallel for a specific letter, it is indicated at its’ foot: The first one is always the key the letter is named on. The second (and third) are given as number(-s), 1 pointing to the left-, 8 to the rightmost one. Only having eight keys also allows to transfer Ahtos input method to game controllers. The buttons can be substituted by the four directions of the two thumb-sticks. This is, of course, implemented, so if you have a MFi controller at hand, please try it. The first main button corresponds to the left direction of the left stick. The second, third and forth follow clock-wise for the remaining directions of the left stick. The fifth button then corresponds with the left direction of the right stick and so forth. Back to the two game modes for Ahto. For the first steps with the new keyboard, one naut is abandoned. This leaves, but you can actually concentrate on just one to avoid collision. Once you master this, you can try the second mode with all three nauts.