It's super simple.
As you can see, there's a big red pause button in the corner of the main screen. The controls have been normalised so you get no benefit by pressing in the corners, (there's a fixed radius from the centre that gives you maximum directional force), so it doesn't interfere with play at all.
The game pauses the frame you hit the pause button. I had it so that you had to hit and release the button to trigger pause, but that just slowed things down, and Mike would fly off until you let go.
The pause menu has just two choices, Resume and Restart. Both trigger on first hit, which is super important for the resume button as the next frame you're controlling Mike. If I had it on release, you'd have to quickly re-press the screen to stop Mike falling, and potentially picking up a collision!
Restart is pretty simple too. It just reloads the level into its initial state.
The result of this attention to minute detail is that I then played the demo level non-stop for a good 10 minutes, trying to get the quickest perfect level possible. The ability to restart so quickly when you take a wide line or narrowly miss a gem is fantastic. The ratio of play-to-presentation is enormous. There's no 3-2-1-GO, just GO! :)
I also got a rad highscore on the Android tablet...
Nice!
