bah - late to the party as usual!
On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 03:02 +0100, Kassen wrote:
> Presto; muscle memory linked to the loop, in a circle no-less, much
> better then this neck-strain-inducing left to right business.
>
> Nice about this is that opposites on the circle are meaningful (count
> 1 and 5 are up and down, for example) which is nice for twich-gamers
> as that equates to shaking the joystick. Intervals of time turn into
> angles, also nice, and I'm far more used to bad repercussions if I
> don't find the "bomb" button fast enough then I'm if I forget where
> the "close square bracket" key is.
Kassen, do you have a link with some pictures of this - it sounds good!
> *Spacial opposites or groupings like to be meaningful, the brain likes
> these a lot.
> *It's a good idea to take a (type of) controller you already used a
> lot.
> *It's a good idea to borrow control schemes from games you played a
> lot.
> *Top quality game controllers (in my case a Hori Real Arcade Pro
> modified with "Sanwa" buttons) are about as expensive as low-budget
> music keyboards and a lot more fun. They can take more violence as
> well and I think they look better.
An incredible amount of work goes into designing gamepads - the
dualshock is such a good design, there is a reason it has changed so
little in years. I use a cheap dualshock ripoff one with too many
buttons (I try to only the 4 on the right hand side)
> *Don't give a single button multiple functions unless this makes a lot
> of sense, whatever you do; don't use a double assignment for loading
> stuff that overwrites your current situation. I tried this, no need
> for anybody else to reproduce my findings as doing so is particularly
> unpleasant. On stage. Multiple times.
> *visual feedback is quite over-rated.
I think it's useful to begin with, but after a while it's not needed.
One thing I'd like to try is use the vibration - I haven't got a driver
that supports it yet (at least through oscjoy on linux) but it's
something I want to look at.
I once had to design the force feedback for a game - I picked different
parameters, health level, exposure, damage, pickups and triggering the
different motors at different speeds - it adds a lot to the feel of
play.
This was the game btw, in case anyone out there has played the PS2
version ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(video_game)
Nintendo are also the masters of all of this - they can make a game with
so little in the way of controls, and make it unbelievably fun and
expressive - the majority of DS games show this off very well.
I'd like to submit a challenge - indy games development competitions are
often run with certain restrictions, one of the more famous being the
one button game.
Is it possible to write code with one button only?
> *Interface sonification for musical instruments is under-rated and a
> good idea if done while taking the musical context into account. In
> case of emergency you can always play the interface by itself ;¬).
Rez springs to mind...
Maybe oft-entered sections of code would become recognisable as
melodies...
cheers,
dave
Received on Sat Jan 05 2008 - 19:04:36 GMT