2D Game Project: Control Freak
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New week, new adventures. I have been promoted so to speak to Lead design for our game project The Last Signal. With this comes a whole new bunch of responsibilities. One of which is ensuring the game is as good as we can make it. And a big thing with a game are the controls. After we had our first playtesting with a bigger crowd we got a lot of feedback on the controls of the game. Some felt that they were hard to grasp, others had an easier time once the grasped the concept while still others really loved it. The controls were as follows: The A-button fires the left thruster making the player rotate counter clockwise The D-button fires the right thruster making the player rotate clockwise And pressing both at once enables the player to move straight ahead in the direction the player character is facing. Also, when the player is rotating the character rotates around its own axis. Then we had our Alpha presentation where the teachers had a say in the matter and they thought that the controls were unfair to the player, that it was too hard to move away from danger like enemy projectiles and the like.
Thus it was clear that something had to be done. But what? I have spent a lot of time this week to analyze the problem. First I had the programmer iterate on the controls so that the player could move more freely in any direction but still would be bound to rotate the same way as before. Also there was the addition of the hyper reverse but this was more for fun than for actual gameplay. See picture.
But this was too far from our aesthetic goals, which are to navigate a big object that is not the easiest to control. The controls became to easy and the enemies were to easily dispatched. It felt more like a fast paced action game than what we were going for.
Then we tried to implement a slight side movement to the original controls. Now the character does not rotate around its own axis but more to the side and finally in a complete circle. See picture
This became even harder than the first controls and just passing through a door became almost impossible. The previous iterations had a logic to them that this version lacked. It made absolutely no sense that the character moved like this.
Something was definitely lost to the original controls. Something else needed to be done, but what?
I came up with a new idea, or rather a modification of an old idea. So if the player would feel that it was unfair to just be able to rotate, perhaps some kind of reverse mechanism could be used. So to stay with the logic of the original control scheme, rotating around its own axis, two new thrusters were added, on the exact opposite side of the player character so that now there are two thrusters for each direction. I know that this might seem to complicated but as I previously stated, in the context of the control scheme it makes sense. Two thrusters to move the player in the direction that the player character is facing and two thrusters to move the player in the opposite direction. Also if the two thrusters that rotate the player the same way are activated at the same time the player rotates faster. See picture.
This way the player can rotate faster if needed and back away from potential dangers without losing the the feeling of controlling a big thing that is hard to control.
I know that there is still more to be done. Fine tuning and tweaking and lots more of testing to get this absolutely right. I sure hope my programmers do not strangle me in the coming weeks. May the space be prosper  |
