Would you be willing to spitball potential phone design solutions for posterity in case someone else was interested in trying to solve the problem? I'd find it delightful to chew over possible UX solutions even if they're not going to find application in reality.
First, at least one phone-based solution exists (
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.coffeeshopstudio.meksheets), though I haven't spent time with it. If I were going to do a small-screen solution I'd start by trying that out for sure. Any experience with it could easily invalidate any or all of my following thoughts.
Really though, absent trying that out, any of my thoughts are probably worth less than 2 cents. But a few thoughts did come to mind when I was considering small-screen support.
The problems flow from the main goal and there's a few similar looking goals, so it's important to be clear on what we're really doing. In my case it's to create a 'digital' record sheet that functions ~comparatively~ well as paper record sheet, with an eye towards newer players, while being imminently useful for experienced players. (And it has to look good©).
But this is vague. We need to be more specific about what people are -doing- with these pieces of paper—what the activity is. BT players do things like looking for information in order to make decisions and to know what game-allowed actions they can take, making game meaningful marks (e.g. filling in bubbles), making game _related_ marks (e.g. jotting down target numbers, marking PSR's that need to happen later), making extra-game adjustments (that damage was actually supposed to be on the left side...), and some things that are in-between like marking what their heat
will be, later, at the end of the round, and then adjusting as damage necessitates. (These often connect with player-table and player-player interactions, but let's bracket that off for now, aside from noting that players will be playing together opposed to playing alone-together, which could make a difference for things like sharing unit information or the overall posture people take towards one another (e.g friendly vs competitive).)
Current paper record sheets are _really_ great for a lot of this. (Which shouldn't be surprising because the game-play activity was itself essentially designed around using pieces of paper!)
Perhaps most importantly, record-sheets provide an immediate high-level organized view of every detail of every system at the blink of an eye. For example, a Wolverien's right torso has no armor, one slot of ammo with 6 rounds, and no CASE, meaning: Danger Will Robinson! The solution even scales some; Multiple pages on a table can provide information for about a lance-ish worth of units at once-ish. In the case of larger forces, 'accessing' relevant info is as intuitive as flipping pages on a clipboard. Moreover, as a rule of thumb, clear/strong spatial arrangements seem to help people digest and recall information more easily; pretty handy when
you're dealing with a lot of granular information. The moment any of this information is hidden (i.e. off screeen) the designer needs (1) an information navigation solution that involves moving hands (2) design solutions for showing the right amount of the right information at the right time (which itself entails new visual information-design problems) (3) technical solutions for wedding the phone-sized and tablet-sized presentations into the same presntation logic. (Any one of these prompt a reflexive 'nope' from me, but maybe not a fully thought-out one.)
It's important to note that any solution for (1) will be slower and than eyeballs and so (2) is going to have to be
really smart to avoid even the
sense of 'getting in the way'. Here's an example of what I mean by 'a sense of getting in the way': Automatically resolving an assault mech's worth of attacks is _really_ fast compared to doing it with dice, even for an experienced player with all the charts memorized. But
inputing target numbers is literally extra work and creates up-front lag. So an experienced player with dice can calculate numbers in their head and get to 'shooting' faster even if they don't finish faster, which can make the digital version feel a little cumbersome or regressive. (Which isn't to say it's not impossible to mitigate, it's just one specific challenge of this kind.) There are also some inescapable issues, like how any digital RS system will only ever have imperfect game-state information. Some details, like range and attack direction will be trapped on the board and need additional UI for humans to play data-bridge. (I
have looked into AR tracking, but the tolerances aren't tight enough for 1/285 scale, and yes larger figures would be a super cool way around this if you want to send me some to experiment with!) Not that this is a deal-breaker, it just means there's lots of places where little bits of interface cruft can accumulate, so each bit has to be carefully treated otherwise you could end up with a record sheet interface instead of a record sheet. And every bit of added navigation can add bits of cruft.
Paper record sheets are also extremely extendable, which may be worth noting because this is the game with hundreds of pages of optional rules after all. Hot loading LRM's, just write "hot loaded". Bin of inferno rounds? Just write it down. Coolant failure, just cross off a heat sink dot. Rapid fire machine guns? No changes at all! That's really hard to compete with. And if you want to, implementing all the rules is a pretty rough way to go—the alternative is to make your digital sheet
pliable—modifiable in ways that aren't just rule automations... Of course if the core goal is to be 'rule police' of a tournament setting, maybe this doesn't matter.
Now, I totally admit that just tabbing out unit systems (meta/armor/internal/crits/heat/inventory) ~might~ provide ~most~ of the navigation needed, and ~relatively~ quickly. (And this is what Coffee Shop Studio's Mech Sheets seems to do.) I smell some peculiar challenges lurking around complex system interactions: things like a shot going internal, blowing off a limb that contains two heat sinks and causing a heat spike that will induce an ammo explosion roll later in the round. (My poor Battlemaster last weekend!) But, who knows, with a few tab-badges and a tight alert system... maybe no big deal?
