Forty-Four Pixels Under Fire
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
44 is the one constant in the file that draws my game’s touch buttons, and the file does not say where it comes from. The buttons arrived on a Friday in a commit called mobile, alongside gamepad polling, a shared menu navigator and a prompt asking phones held upright to turn sideways. There are two of them: a dash button for the thumb that is not on the joystick, and a fullscreen toggle in the top corner. Both are sized by the same rule. Take the design size, thirty for the dash and twenty-two for the toggle, multiply by the HUD scale, and never let the radius fall below twenty-two. Forty-four pixels across, at minimum, whatever the player has done to the HUD.
The player can do a lot to the HUD. There is a UI scale setting in the options, stepped in tenths from half size to double, and it multiplies everything the HUD draws: the health bar, the timer, the kill count, the combo meter, the joystick. Those are things you read, and reading tolerates small; a player who wants more of the arena and less chrome turns the slider down and gets what they asked for. The two buttons follow the slider down until the floor binds, and then they stop. At half scale the dash button would be thirty pixels across. The constant holds it at forty-four.
Because the dash is the one input in the game that has to land during a fight. It is how you leave a crowd. A dash button that honoured the slider all the way down would be smallest for the player who most wanted a clean screen, in the wave where the thumb covering it is moving fastest, and they would learn where it had gone by dying. The floor is the game declining to honour one setting completely, for one control, on the grounds that the player can choose how much to see but not how much of a fingertip they have.
The number is not mine. Forty-four points is the minimum Apple has asked for on anything you tap since the first iPhone, chosen from the size of a fingertip pressed flat on glass; the web accessibility guidelines name the same forty-four by forty-four for their strictest target-size criterion. Every platform that has measured a thumb has come back with roughly this. The constant in the file is the game agreeing with them without citing them.
The buttons appear only when the control mode is the joystick, which is to say only on the devices with a thumb to measure, and they sit at the joystick’s own depth so nothing in the HUD draws over them. The constant has no comment. The number is the comment.