I’m working on a top-down 2d-movement game prototype with a spaceship that moves in a similar way to how the asteroids ship moved. On a desktop with a keyboard I would use A and D keys to turn left and right relative to the spaceship, and W to accelerate. However, on a gamepad those controls are clunky. I can only imagine they’ll be even more clunky with a simulated gamepad on a mobile device.
On mobile devices I’m thinking of just having a ‘follow the finger’ interface where the ship will turn to the location of the touch and thrust in that direction, or else I’ll have a button to handle the thrust.
What is a good way to handle controller input on a gamepad? I tried having the ship simply face the direction of the control stick and thrust in that direction too, but it lacks any sort of feeling of being in space. It’s like walking around a 2-stick shooter with the character always facing the direction of movement.
My game prototype has inertia that affects the ships flying through space so you have to reverse course and thrust backwards to slow down rather than the ship just slowing of its own accord. I also experimented with requiring the same counter-thrust idea to turning, so you have to put in opposite input to stop turning, but that turned out to be counter-intuitive in a 2d top-down game.
Any suggestions on how I can handle user input on the various platforms?
I have a game very much like this ready for finishing touches now (sigh…). It’s a mobile game played in portrait mode. After some playtesting, I ended up putting in three control scheme options:
Touch where you want the ship to go; the ship turns in that directions and thrusts while the touch is down.
A control bar at the bottom of the screen. This is a bit hard to explain, but easy to pick up when you try it. Basically if you touch well on the left side, you rotate left and thrust; if you touch well on the right, you turn right and thrust; if you touch in the middle (or touch both left and right together), then you go straight or turn slowly (depending on how close to the center you are) and thrust.
A control dial at the bottom of the screen. This is basically a virtual stick; where you touch determines which way you turn to face (and thrust).
The simple touch-to-go scheme 1 is the default, and is most popular with new players, who always try that first regardless. The problem with it is that your finger is always getting in the way, making it hard to see what you’re doing. So, more experienced players usually switch to scheme 2 or 3. Scheme 2 is my personal preference.
Like you (and Asteroids!), we have linear momentum, but no angular momentum… that’d be just too annoying to fly.
If your asking about gamepad on (not mobile) imo using the triggers or bumpers to turn left or right would be a cool interesting control scheme to turn left and right. One of these buttons also has pressure sensitivity (I think the trigger) so it could be used to turn only slightly, or slower than full on trigger.
Use the left thumb stick for acceleration, and the entire right buttons can be used for weapons/alt weapons and other things.
On mobile - to me this type of game just doesn’t work well and isn’t suited for that platform. I guess there might be some popular ones, maybe check those out and see what type of control schemes they use. It might also be helpful to look into any type of top down shooter games, the common/popular twin stick shooter games might have some interesting control mechanics that could have inertia incorporated to develop a quality control scheme for this type of game on mobile.
@JoeStrout did you test/consider tap to move type movement? The player taps on the screen and essentially leaves a “go to” target on the screen. The ship flies to the target and the player is able to shoot and perform other actions while the ship is moving. Probably not a great idea, just something that I thought about.
In our case there is nothing more to do — it’s a cave flyer, so the flying is rather intricate. Tap-to-move wouldn’t be any better than the touch scheme as it is, because when you lift your finger, you continue to move in that direction anyway (just no longer accelerating, which is safer, thus what you would want if you’re not sure what’s under your finger).