Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 4, Controls

Of course I can control my character, it’s something unimportant to fix for later. Or is it? Magic Writer’s control scheme has went through several changes during development all for users better enjoyment of the game.

Hello there and welcome to another Design blog post for Magic Writer.

During the development of Magic Writer, we’ve had discussion regarding the control scheme for the game several times. Both teachers and members as well as playtesters have voiced their opinion on the matter loudly. The designers job is to collect all those responses and form a plan to fix this. Let’s go through the problems one by one.

This blog’s artifact: Design of the controls.

Movement
One part of the group wanted to use the WASD keys to change lanes. But I wanted to use the arrow keys for that purpose.

The argument for WASD was that it was more optimal together when firing items with space. It was also faster to get your hands to after you’ve finished writing an item.

My arguments for the arrow keys was that it would feel more natural to a broader audience than the WASD keys. The separation of writing(letters) and movement(arrow keys) would make more sense to the player so they could go write->move->shoot, letters->arrows->enter.

Playtesting then showed us that players actually wants to move before they shoot. This made the arrow keys become the permanent choice for movement options for us, since we didn’t want to go against something the players was doing naturally.

Shooting
Space or Enter was the big question when it came to shooting.

Arguments for space was that it was closer to the left hand’s thumb after writing, which would make it the more optimal way to shoot.

And for enter it was because the letters->arrow->enter would feel better to execute than letters->arrow->space. Also because enter is a more natural choice because people are used to finish writing with enter in chat messages.

This time, playtesting showed us something interesting. Half the players would try and use space and half the players would stick with enter. After keeping enter and later discussing the descicions with our teacher, we decided both buttons would be able to shoot items. So a player could stick with the option he/she was most comfortable with.

Summary
Problems in the controls of our games sparked discussions in our group which brought out different opinions from the members. Later on, playtesting revealed what worked and what didn’t work. From there we took decisions which would be the most intuitive to a first time player.

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.

About Simon Lundgren

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