10 Week Project – Post 3 – Why U No Walk?

In previous posts I’ve written about how the player should be introduced to the game world and now it’s time to start to think about how to introduce the mechanics to the player.

All of our mechanics should be introduced in the tutorial level, but how? The mechanics that needs to be introduced are:

• Movement
• Sprinting
• Use
• Knock Out

The first one and most essential is probably movement, so we’re going to start with that one.

I’ve discussed our minimal HUD and GUI before, so we need to introduce movement (walking) to the player without any prompting of “Walk forward with W” for example. We could use that method, but it would break the rest of our GUI design and it would also cause a problem since we let the player bind different keys to every action. This wouldn’t be that hard to fix since we could just change the printed “W” to the key of the player’s own bindings. But it seems like some unnecessary work for the programmers, especially when it breaks our own design methods. And if some players have gone into the Controls Menu and changed some bindings, they probably have some understanding of what the keys do. So let’s scratch that idea and move on.

I was stuck for a couple of nights thinking about how to solve this and I soon remembered the Super Mario level Marcus showed us. In that game/level, the developers didn’t show the player the controls as a part of the game interface. They just assumed that the player would understand to move with the arrow keys on the controller. But it might not be clear to everyone that those buttons moved the character, so they made the first part (or opening) of the level without any direct threats. It’s just an open field to let the player play around. This would give the player some time to try the different buttons without any risk of losing or getting in trouble.

So that might be the way for us to go? Granted, we do not have a side scrolling game and a lot more buttons with the keyboard. But maybe we can assume that the player has some understanding and experience of games from before so that they will try the WASD keys from the start.

We should probably also give the player some room the breath with an empty room without threats.

This is the “Spawn Room”. There is a guard in front of the player, but he cannot see nor detect the player from that distance. 

To be even more helpful or forgiving to the inexperienced player, we could also enable the arrow keys as a way of moving and not just the WASD keys.

We have also toyed around with the idea of printing a message on the floor to the player, like “Move” or “Walk” as a part of the floor texture to give an extra hint of what to do. I will talk more about that method when we get to the introduction of sprinting.

So, is this fair to the player? Is there any other obvious option that I have missed? I’d love to hear your thoughts.