Dev blog 81 - Fun with gamepads
Hi folks!
This week we won’t be pushing a patch out because we don’t have any notable changes done. Mat is on vacation so there are no balance changes, and I’m still busy with gamepad support, tho I’m getting into the finishing stages of the core functionality so hopefully soon I’ll go back to some gameplay stuffs.
Since there’s no other topic we could talk about, I’ll continue talking about gamepads from last week.
The current state of the support is fairly complete. All the main screens are fully usable with the gamepad in a way that, at least to me as a non-console user, feels relatively normal. There are a few places that are janky and weird, most notably selection of spells in the core, node selection in the overworld map and the tile picking in fights. Basically, anything that has to do with 3D elements, which is probably not surprising since 2D UI interaction with gamepads is much more intuitive (and simple!) than anything to do with 3D that requires picking.
When I envisioned spell selection in the core, I thought that it would make sense to use the up/down stick or d-pad movement to move between spell tiers, and left/right would move between the individual spells in that tier. After implementing it, I’ll say that my vision was entirely wrong, and it feels very unintuitive and crap. So I’ll be changing that so it works more like a directional thing where UP selects the first spell that’s above the currently selected one, and so on.
The world map node selection is a bit better, but still weird. It works by requiring you to push the stick in the direction of the node you want to select relative to the current node, but this has 2 issues. The first is that when two nodes are in a relatively similar direction, it’s hard to precisely pick which one you want to really go to because the margin for difference is very small. The second is a bit of unintuitiveness stemming from the first issue: you can’t push UP to select the top node, but have to push in the, for example, right-and-up-a-bit to select it. This is another thing that will be tweaked once I get some feedback and ideas for a fix.
Lastly, the combat tile picking is the weirdest one. I’ve tried 3 solutions so far, and neither felt good :( The main problem I’ve identified is that our game doesn’t use a pure isometric projection (which would keep the vertical lines parallel to the screen), but a very narrow perspective projection. The camera is very far away from the map and is using a small FoV for a sort of telescopic lens effect. The other part is that the camera is looking down at an angle. So the issues I saw were:
Both issues are a natural byproduct of our setup, but they do have a solution which will just take a bit more thought put into it, or a moment of epiphany to hit me like a truck and make me feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner.
If you have some ideas for how any of these might work from a user perspective, I welcome the feedback. I don’t own any consoles and only play games with my gamepad when it feels it would fit (like platformers), so having good feeling gamepad controls is a bit outside of my experience range. I can also answer any inquiries regarding how any other part of the game works with the controller, in case you wanted to know.
Join our Discord server if you want a more direct approach to leaving feedback!
MarkoP
This week we won’t be pushing a patch out because we don’t have any notable changes done. Mat is on vacation so there are no balance changes, and I’m still busy with gamepad support, tho I’m getting into the finishing stages of the core functionality so hopefully soon I’ll go back to some gameplay stuffs.
Since there’s no other topic we could talk about, I’ll continue talking about gamepads from last week.
The current state of the support is fairly complete. All the main screens are fully usable with the gamepad in a way that, at least to me as a non-console user, feels relatively normal. There are a few places that are janky and weird, most notably selection of spells in the core, node selection in the overworld map and the tile picking in fights. Basically, anything that has to do with 3D elements, which is probably not surprising since 2D UI interaction with gamepads is much more intuitive (and simple!) than anything to do with 3D that requires picking.
When I envisioned spell selection in the core, I thought that it would make sense to use the up/down stick or d-pad movement to move between spell tiers, and left/right would move between the individual spells in that tier. After implementing it, I’ll say that my vision was entirely wrong, and it feels very unintuitive and crap. So I’ll be changing that so it works more like a directional thing where UP selects the first spell that’s above the currently selected one, and so on.
The world map node selection is a bit better, but still weird. It works by requiring you to push the stick in the direction of the node you want to select relative to the current node, but this has 2 issues. The first is that when two nodes are in a relatively similar direction, it’s hard to precisely pick which one you want to really go to because the margin for difference is very small. The second is a bit of unintuitiveness stemming from the first issue: you can’t push UP to select the top node, but have to push in the, for example, right-and-up-a-bit to select it. This is another thing that will be tweaked once I get some feedback and ideas for a fix.
Lastly, the combat tile picking is the weirdest one. I’ve tried 3 solutions so far, and neither felt good :( The main problem I’ve identified is that our game doesn’t use a pure isometric projection (which would keep the vertical lines parallel to the screen), but a very narrow perspective projection. The camera is very far away from the map and is using a small FoV for a sort of telescopic lens effect. The other part is that the camera is looking down at an angle. So the issues I saw were:
- When the hit tile (or the screen point that defines which tile is hit) happens to be on the edge of the screen, pushing the stick UP actually moved the hit world point towards the up-and-left/right (depending on which side of the screen you’re on), which is caused by the perspective projection having a vanishing point, towards which all points will move to when going away from the camera.
- The speed of moving the hit world point up or down is not the same as moving it left/right, which is caused by the camera angle: moving 1 meter away from the camera will move a shorter vertical screen distance than moving 1 meter left/right and keeping the same distance from the camera.
Both issues are a natural byproduct of our setup, but they do have a solution which will just take a bit more thought put into it, or a moment of epiphany to hit me like a truck and make me feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner.
If you have some ideas for how any of these might work from a user perspective, I welcome the feedback. I don’t own any consoles and only play games with my gamepad when it feels it would fit (like platformers), so having good feeling gamepad controls is a bit outside of my experience range. I can also answer any inquiries regarding how any other part of the game works with the controller, in case you wanted to know.
Join our Discord server if you want a more direct approach to leaving feedback!
MarkoP