Reply With QuotePLEASE if your game plays with keyboard, let the menus work with keyboard too. And more importantly, make dialogs that pop up during play alos work with keyboard! I hate it when games make me keep swapping.
Mouse only controls for casual games?
Mouse only controls for casual games?
This is in response to a question about making a casual platform game but I though I would spin it off into a whole separate topic. I am sure isn’t the first time we discussed this topic, but I see a lot of people confused and frustrated by the “mouse only” controls idea and some people go overboard cramming all kind of strange things into mouse controls to satisfy a goal they don’t understand.
I am not sure I am correctly interpreting your “left/right relative moves” statement but I am guessing that there would be no mouse cursor and you would make the character walk at a constant rate to the left when the mouse is moved to the left. But I could be wrong and all of the fallowing would be irrelevant.Originally Posted by clilian
I think the main reason people talk about using mouse only controls for casual games is to make the controls as intuitive as possible. That is the real goal. Make the controls simple and intuitive. It is possible to completely miss that goal and still use the mouse only. Whenever possible you should use a mouse cursor. Usually casual games have a cursor and the player clicks on objects to interact with them. The main exception would be if the player avatar is the mouse cursor. In games like Platapus, Feeding Frenzy, and any breakout game, the player character moves nearly in sync with the mouse and there is no need for a cursor. I can’t image you accomplishing this with “left/right relative moves” in a platform game with a walking and jumping character. It seems like the character would be connected to the mouse only very loosely and it may not be that intuitive at all. You may want to consider showing a mouse cursor and having the character walk towards it or maybe even walk to the point of a click.
Either that, or just make the bold move to use the keyboard! My point is, use whatever controls and simple and intuitive. Forcing yourself to use the mouse does not necessarily result is intuitive controls.
Here are the options as I see them for casual games in order of preference from best to worst
- Intuitive mouse controls (best options)
- Intuitive keyboard controls (not a bad options but will take extra pop-up message to make sure the player knows to press the keys
- Nonstandard use of the mouse. Control that seem forced into a mouse system (bad option)
- Using the mouse and keyboard at the same time (such as run with keys and shoot with mouse. This words great for Crimsonland but is not very accusable to the casual player)
- Complicated keyboard controls with many keys to remember (good for a some types of hard core game but bad for a casual game)
Good keyboard controls are better than bad mouse controls even for a casual game. Don’t make bad controls just to satisfy the “mouse only” design goal of casual games.
James C. Smith - Producer/Lead Programmer - Costume Chaos, Build in Time, Ricochet Infinity, Big Kahuna Reef, CasualCharts.com
PLEASE if your game plays with keyboard, let the menus work with keyboard too. And more importantly, make dialogs that pop up during play alos work with keyboard! I hate it when games make me keep swapping.
Well, I have uploaded a small test (Java 1.5 applet) illustrating mouse input...
I'm not impressed by the results... but may be someone could comment on enhancing this. I'm open to all suggestions.
Lilian
edited : changed the link to allow more tests
Last edited by clilian; 08-31-2005 at 08:05 AM.
Actually, I'm surprised how well it works. Unfortunately, you could never have a windowed or browser version of the game, but for fullscreen, it's a good start. Of course, I'm not interacting with anything, so my opinion (and everyone elses') will be heavily biased.
Daniel Kinney
solaristudios:. ● TIGRS - The Independent Game Rating System ● "Hard-Sell: The Only Sell"
Well, I still can grab the mouse and force it to stay in the center of the applet (but that would require a signed/trusted applet). Or create a "really big applet" and ask politely for a maximized browser window.
Lilian
How about having a free floating cursor that only controls the character when within a certain distance? Say you click the player to "grab" the character, then if you move it x amount of pixels ahead, the character will walk. Further out, it will jog, still further out, it will run up to its predetermined limit. Jumping could be activated with a mouse click, while the direction and of the jump would still be controlled by the mouse movement.
look at the snowy games from alawar or iggle pop from sprout
imo if the mouse input is done right it's much more fun and immersive then keyboard controls could ever be.
Amen to that! That is a pet peeve of mine in so many games. It seems to especially plague a lot of otherwise very cool Flash games. They make you take your hand off the keyboard to proceed to the next level, dismiss dialogs, or start a new game.
Marty Rabens
__________________
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night.
I would say that if you use keyboard, no matter how simple and intuitive you make the keyboard controls, you will end up cutting out a certain percentage of the buying population. Some people just wont play any games that use keyboard controls. For them it's an immediate quit and move on to the next demo. I've seen this with various customers and players. Im not really sure how big that population is though but Im quite sure there's some truth to the notion that a game "must" use mouse controls. (in the sense that yes you are cutting out some of your potential as soon as you make the decision to use keys... I just dont know how much.. it may be a very small population in the end.)
I think you'd be worse off trying to force mouse control only into a game that just isn't designed for it though. Pacman with mouse only doesnt strike me as a very good design. Mouse only pacman would probably sell worse than keyboard pacman.
Steve Verreault - Twilight Games
http://www.twilightgames.com --- http://www.indiegamer.com
"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to. - Oscar Wilde
To me, Iggle Pop is a perfect example of forcing mouse control in a keyboard game. IMO it really detracts from an otherwise excellent game. A game I made, Best Friends, is another example. I may have been better making it keyboard only...
dunno about that. I think best friends was fine with mouse control, same with Hamsterball.
Hamsterball was way better with the mouse. (Actually, it was best with both the mouse and the keyboard.) Of course, Hamsterball is a very physical game, so the natural analog control of a mouse felt much better and offered much finer control than keys ever could.
Daniel Kinney
solaristudios:. ● TIGRS - The Independent Game Rating System ● "Hard-Sell: The Only Sell"
Turtle Odyssey is #3 at Real this week... And it's keyboard-only :-)
I've update the applet with some platforms to jump on !
Ricardo, I'll try your suggestion asap.
I'll also try the other games to see how they manage mouse interaction...
Any feedback on the applet is still welcome (now there's something to do with it).
the applet
Lilian
(edited : typo)
Last edited by clilian; 08-31-2005 at 11:19 PM.
the controls demonstrated in that applet aren't very good. Go and play Wik, and also any Snowy game. Wik, to see how a player could jump on a platform, and Snowy to see how it to make em walk... basically you get a vector from the characters locations, depending on the distance and angle you character could walk, jump, run etc.
mouse control will limit you but limits drive you to be more creative
Jumpman
thanks for the applet lilian. Although try as a i might, i couldn't make it onto the highest platforms.
But i think it does show that the mouse is a decent controller for platformers. The movement of your character / rectangle feels a lot more fluid when using the mouse to control it as opposed to using the arrow keys. With this in mind, the combination of digital controls and the traditional flat, horizontal platforms as seen in Mario games may not be completely suitable to a mouse based approach.
...
Rory
I actually thought Cillian's example nearly worked great. Only things that bugged me was the way the mouse froze when you clicked to jump, and the mouse occasionally jumped around seemingly at random when I was jumping (edit: of course these might actually be the same problem). If the mouse was free to move (left and right) at all times I think it'd work quite well.
Wik works well because of the tounge idea - it's not really something you could transfer to any other concept.
Should work now, I wasn't using the full set of mouse events.
Lilian
I think that works really well. I'd happily play a game like that
That is exactly how I felt about Iggle Pop. Having to use the bleedin' mouse when I was ITCHING to use the keyboard!
Even if you provide the option within your game to use keyboard or mouse, seems evident to me, for the casual player anyhow, to be TOO MUCH INFORMATION!!!!!!
To my mind, it's gonna take someone like POPCAP to show these players that the mouse is not the BE ALL AND END ALL!!!
All the best
Mark.
I recently added mouse support to my game, that works very similar to how it works in Best Friends. Of course, it's not the ideal use of the mouse. But I was thinking "well, why not?" - the game gives you a very clear choice to use mouse or keys (as does BF for that matter), and it might help some people out.
Certainly, my wife could "sort-of" play the game once I added the mouse controls, but couldn't work the keys at all. And lots of other people I observed trying to play with keys would do crazy stuff like be running left, and then when they wanted to run the other way, they would look down and move their finger from the left cursor key to the right cursor key. Obviously you aren't going to get very far if you have to look at the keyboard every time you switch keys.
And actually, since adding mouse control, I've been using it myself. It's not as precise, but it's nice and lazy - you only need one hand.
Of course, of course, a mouse-only game with a mouse pointer is the most intuitive and accessible option. But it's also only appropriate for certain sorts of games - and it's totally inappropriate for lots of really cool sorts of games which I would love to see more of. So I don't think it's a matter of "missing the point" of mouse control - the real question is, whether it really is true that using the mouse as a sort of poor-man's analogue stick really is less intuitive and accessible than using the keyboard - and whether having both options is worse than just sticking to one.
Would Best Friends really have worked better with just the keyboard? I have my doubts - it requires 8-directional movement, which is the trickiest sort for people to get to grips with. I suspect that if Mike had've done things over, knowing what he knows now, he wouldn't have made the game keyboard only - I think he wouldn't have made the game at all. He would have made a mouse-pointer game instead.
And that, quite frankly, sucks. I much prefer games where you control the character, not a pointer.
Oh, Mike has just alerted me to the fact that the #3 game on Realarcade is a platformer at the moment. And it's keyboard only.
People seem to be liking it okay - it's worth noting that the controls are very simple indeed; I played through the first seven thousand levels (well, it seemed like it) using only left, right and up. Later on, you use down as well. It's also a very, very easy game, so dying isn't much of an issue.
All in all, a positive sign I suppose. Although it doesn't exactly reassure me that my game (with fairly complex controls by these standards I'm afraid) will go down well with "the masses".
That's a tough question. The game has been a financial success, despite a poor conversion ratio compared to games like Cosmo Bots. It also is a perfect game for kids, and it seems most of its sales are parents buying it for kids. Also, the Sponge Bob reskin of the game is still the featured game at nickarcade.com. So I guess I would make it againm but there was some luck there for sure in that it was able to find an audience outside of the traditional 40-year-old female.
But I still like keyboard/joystick for it much better than faking it with a mouse pointer. And man did I try every which way possible to make the controls better- I spent weeks! At one point, it worked just like hamsterball, but people kept running out of mousepad. You would be amazed that people refuse to pick up their mouse and move it back to the center of the pad
I have a half-done donkeykong'ish platformer based on the Best Friends code, and I have dropped and picked up the project a few times, mainly because I fear it won't sell...
Would that be the one featuring a dog?
Marty Rabens
__________________
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night.
Yup... I have one more idea I want to try before I give up on the project... Just have to find the time to implement it
That's what I am talking about! Good mouse controls is the goal. But force keyboard controls into a mouse is worse than using the keyboard. Good mouse controls are the best solution, but keyboard controls are still a better solution than some forms of mouse controls.
If I had to make a PacMan clone, and I was trying to make it sell well on RealAracde, I would NOT use mouse controls. The kayboard is a better fit for that game. Then again, I wouldn’t make a Pac Man clone if I had a choice because the core play mechanic does not lend itself to intuitive mouse controls.
Last edited by James C. Smith; 09-01-2005 at 06:52 AM.
James C. Smith - Producer/Lead Programmer - Costume Chaos, Build in Time, Ricochet Infinity, Big Kahuna Reef, CasualCharts.com
I am not at all surprised to hear that a keyboard only game made the top 10 on Real. I think there is a lot of truth to the notion that games target at the causal audience do better if they have mouse controls. But this has been blown way out of proportion by some people in the past. That is why I stated this topic. Not to talk about specific control for a platform game, but to try to dispel this myth that all implementations of keyboard controls are inferior to all implementations of mouse controls. And to dispel the myth that you can take an existing game, and adapt it to use the mouse, and you will end up with a better selling game because of the adoption of the controls. The top selling mouse only games were designed to be played with a mouse, not adapted to mouse controls after he fact. Sometimes adapting a joystick or keyboard game to mouse can go well. But often times it makes a worse game rather than a better one. I am glad someone finally proved a good keyboard game can do well.
James C. Smith - Producer/Lead Programmer - Costume Chaos, Build in Time, Ricochet Infinity, Big Kahuna Reef, CasualCharts.com
Just downloaded and played Turtle Odyssey!
Nice to see simple keyboard controls working (plus joystick). The game for me was way too simplistic though, but that's just me!!
The other thing I noticed is that the game requires DIRECTX 8.0 or higher, which is a big plus in my book. That's probably due to the fact that most people probably have XP as compared to other OS's, but I could be wrong.
All the best
Mark.
Really odd that Realore (makers of "Turtle Odyssey") use an up arrow for their download button... http://www.realore.com/images/download_en.gif
Daniel Kinney
solaristudios:. ● TIGRS - The Independent Game Rating System ● "Hard-Sell: The Only Sell"
they're all about turning conventions on their eye lol
that is very strange.
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