Movement

Today we're going to talk about movement. Project Spaceboat began life as a game about a viking boat flying through space and dodging UFO's. The controls were stiff, with a setup that had four lanes that the player could move to. The lane change wasn't instant and so the boat became unresponsive and unresponsive controls are one of the most heinous things I, as the designer, could have done. Luckily not a ton of development time was spent on this. I abandoned it early and quickly in favor of a more fluid control scheme. The lanes still exist, sure, because that's an easy way to spawn enemies and know precisely where they'll end up. The important thing ended up being that control would not be tied to them. Player control has improved dramatically due to this change.

Here's the original layout:

The circles on the left are terminators, objects I use to destroy spawned objects that go off of the screen. The circles on the right are spawners. The character would move on the lines created between them when the user pressed 'w' or 's' (and later touched above or below).

Really basic and simple, my thinking was that it would be better for touch devices to have as simple a control scheme as possible. But even with the keyboard's precise controls it proved frustrating. Since I was still early in development I decided on a rework of the control scheme. I kept the terminators and spawners in the lane format I had going but decided to allow the player to move anywhere they liked. So now you could click anywhere you wanted on the screen and you would have immediate feedback from your character. It felt really good.

This taught me that player control should not be removed for any reason, because if the player isn't controlling the game why are they even playing to begin with? Interactivity is what makes the medium wholly unique to others. This seems so obvious now and to anyone reading this they may be thinking that they would never make such a simple and core mistake like it, but rest assured that thinking about development and design is much easier than actually doing it. Sometimes it takes making the simple mistakes to make sure they do not show up later down the line when your projects get bigger and iteration can't happen as fast as it can with your small projects.