I'm trying to come up with the UI for a game I'm creating for the iPhone/iPad. The game is based off another online game form years ago, and they had their HUD on the left side of the screen.
I'm trying to make my game look as different from the original as possible, so I was trying to see if moving the HUD to a different part of the screen would help.
Here is the game that is my inspiration (I plan to make my own graphics and everything myself. I don't want it to resemble the original game at all graphically):
The object of the game is to match symbols on the game board with others of the same symbol or same color. The grey box being a wild space. The end goal is to try to fill up the board with yellow spaces to clear the level. A yellow space is placed once a symbol is correctly placed on the board. If an entire row or column is filled, the symbols clear, but the yellow spaces stay. There's also a 'trash can' that a player can drop a symbol if it won't fit on the current game board. It will only hold 4 symbols and a gameover is on the 4th symbol dropped in.
Anywho, my question is, if this game were on an iPhone or iPad, would it make less sense if the HUD (the area to the left with the score, etc) was on the right? or even the top or bottom?
It seems more intuitive to have it on the left because that's how I read, but is that really the case? Could I move it around without causing annoyance or confusion?