Board Game Programming Tutorial – Touch

This post is part of my series on computerizing board games and will describe handling touch input.

We build board games for a touch table where all the players sit around a screen laying horizontally. Like a big tablet setting on a table. This means that we arrange the player controls around the outside edge of the screen. It also means that multiple players can be touching the screen at the same time.

The Unity UI didn’t handle windows multi-touch natively, so we used a free plugin called TouchScript to receive windows multi-touch events and pass them into the Unity UI event system. Unity has added windows multi-touch support, so TouchScript is now only needed if you want to support TUIO or gestures.

Allowing multi-touch does sometimes complicate the design of a UI. You have to add code to handle multiple valid inputs being pressed simultaneously.