This month's User Interface & Experience category includes 4 filed patent applications from 3 companies: Skydance Silicon Valley (2), Supercell (1), and Yidian Lingxi Information Technology (Guangzhou) Co.
(1). Skydance Silicon Valley filed two patents covering timeline navigation systems that allow players to scrub through game sequences like video content, with one application incorporating machine learning to detect player frustration and suggest story jumps. Supercell's application covers a multi-touch interface for deploying game resources across multiple screen locations simultaneously. Yidian Lingxi Information Technology (Guangzhou) Co. filed a patent describing a visualization system that displays enemy chase routes in real-time to help players make tactical decisions during hostile NPC encounters.
Supercell received 1 patent for a multi-touch interface that allows players to deploy resources at multiple screen locations with a single gesture. Instead of tapping repeatedly to place individual units or items, players can use a swipe or multi-finger touch to distribute resources across several points at once. The system adjusts deployment speed and quantity based on how hard the player presses and how fast they move their finger, creating a more fluid control scheme for strategy games that typically require managing units across large battlefields.
Skydance Silicon Valley filed 2 patents that both address timeline-based navigation in narrative games. The first allows players to skip forward through unplayed content using a visual timeline interface, with machine learning detecting when someone is stuck and suggesting jumps without revealing plot details through spoiler-aware preview frames. The second expands this concept into a bi-directional scrubbing system that works like a video editor, letting players move backward and forward through any moment they've experienced or haven't yet reached. This application automatically adjusts the density of available jump points depending on context, offering fine control during cutscenes while restricting gameplay skips to specific narrative checkpoints, and maintains this functionality even as players move between different game scenes.
Yidian Lingxi Information Technology (Guangzhou) Co. received 1 patent for a system that shows players the movement paths of enemies chasing them in RPG games. The interface displays pursuit routes in real-time, including indicators for off-screen threats with actual distance measurements, giving players spatial information about dangers they can't directly see. The system tracks enemies continuously even when players transition between different game areas, keeping the threat visualization active across scene changes.
All data sourced from USPTO patent filings. Google Patents may take several weeks to index recent publications. If a link is unavailable, search for the patent number at USPTO Patent Public Search.