The Steam Deck’s multitouch screen might be its most underutilised feature. Until recently, I wasn’t even sure whether devs could use it for anything more than simple mouse emulation. But I’ve just started playing “Sky: Children of the Light” on my Deck (which is generally a great experience on Deck, especially on the OLED with 90Hz HDR) and I found that when using a musical instrument, you can actually use the touchscreen to play up to 10 notes at the same time.
This got me curious: Do you know if there are any other games on Deck using multitouch, or is Sky the first one that does it?
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Most PC games probably won’t support multitouch, I’d guess you’re most likely to find it in games that have a phone version (or started as a phone game).
I don’t know of a good way to identify those games though. My best guess is to look at some of the curated lists of touchscreen friendly games (example 1, example 2) and look for games that are available as a mobile title and would benefit from multitouch support.
I have to imagine it’s because sky was released on mobile first so the multitouch option was already there. Really cool that it works though! Maybe other mobile games that got ported would have similar functionality?
I heard that it’s better on the OLED but the og deck’s touch screen is kinda poor. So I haven’t really used it much :/
Weirdly any game that is cross platform with mobile will probably be years ahead of pc or console games.
Farlight 84 I haven’t played on the steam deck yet but I would assume that would have support for the full touchscreen claw interface customization screen. That kind of play style is very competitive and capable of twitch sun shots but it absolutely wouldn’t work without solid multitouch support as a foundation in the UI.
Slay the Spire and card games work well with the touch interface. Gem matching games like Matchr work well too. Hardly any once can make use of a multitouch PC game. Touch games tend to be released on the phone.
Here’s a different suggestion. Try emulating Mercury Meltdown for the Wii. That can be played entirely with gyro controls.
The issue is that pc games are not built for multi touch. Maybe emulating platforms which use it more such as the Nintendo DS?
Haven’t tried it on the Deck to see if it still works/works with its implementation, but I remember reading the Linux version of World of Goo works with but doesn’t officially support (presumably meaning if it breaks anything they won’t help you fix it?) multiple mice if you change a variable in the config file
I’m not sure if games actually can support multitouch on Linux unless wine supports Windows’ touchscreen APIs, plus by default touch does mouse emulation instead of native touch
The Sky devs managed to do it somehow in any case. Could be the windows touchscreen API.
