Touch controls that don't fight you back

After years of mobile gaming I've become obsessive about one setting: can I move the buttons? So many games glue the controls to fixed spots that never match where my thumbs actually rest. When a game lets me drag them, everything else gets easier to forgive.

Racing games are the worst offenders and the best examples. A fixed brake in the wrong corner ruined more than one racer for me, while the ones that let me rebuild the layout felt playable within minutes. It's not a small thing.

My routine now is to open the settings before I even start a tutorial. Move the controls, shrink or grow them, turn on the touch region that feels natural. Ten seconds of setup saves an hour of frustration.

If you're a developer reading this: put the layout editor in early, and let people test it against a live screen. That one screen tells me more about your game than the trailer ever did.