Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Some “fighting games,” like the
Street Fighter
series, map many overlapping verbs onto many
buttons—traditionally, six buttons and an eight-directional joystick. Here, learning to physi-
cally perform verbs, and being able to perform them successfully when the time is right, is an
important part of the game. The discipline needed to learn and perform verbs is here intended
as a parallel to the discipline that learning and performing a martial art requires.
Reinforce a verb's physical layer wherever possible. If a game has a title screen and menu, try
to connect the important verbs and input to it. In
To mb ed
, as I've mentioned, the player starts
by making Jane dig through the floor of the title screen using the same button she'll use to dig
in the rest of the game. At the very least, allow the player to navigate the menu with the same
input that she uses for the rest of the game. There are a number of Flash games where the
player's verbs are tied to keyboard keys—say, the arrow keys and the spacebar—but the menus
ask the player to point and click with the mouse.
Imagine if, after every level of the game, the player has to move her hands off the important
keys, take her mouse, point at and click the Next Level button, and then return her fingers to
the arrow keys and spacebar. That's tedious, and what's more, it weakens the player's focus on
the game's verbs and the keys that correspond to them. Games that successfully use both the
keyboard and the mouse usually assume that the player has only one hand on a limited set of
keyboard keys and the other hand on the mouse, to avoid this kind of fumbling and switching
of the hand positions.
I recently discovered an iPad game called
Mini Mix Mayhem
(2012), the premise of which is that
the player or players have to manage up to four games, with different rules and goals, that are
sharing the screen at the same time. There are around 20 games in all that can show up in the
four you have to juggle at once, each controlled in a different way that suits the game's visual
metaphor. Unwinding a nut from a screw involves physically flicking the nut to the left; you
think of actually using your finger to spin a nut loose. Solving a which-cup-is-it-under puzzle
requires just tapping the right cup; you think of pointing at the cup for the barker, who then
reveals what's under it. Collecting drops of rain in a cup involves holding your finger on the cup
and dragging it left and right; you think of holding a cup and moving it around.
Many of us will never design for a touchscreen, but regardless of what physical actions we're
giving the player to perform the verbs in our games, we can design actions that call to mind the
properties of our verbs—that communicate and reinforce the rules of our game.
Degrees of Control
Different kinds of input allow for different paces of input. Mouse input, for example, is highly
nuanced. It allows for slow, gentle movements, or fast, sweeping movements, along two axes
simultaneously. (A player can move a mouse
up
and to the
left
, for example, at rates that are
independent of each other.) Often, games use mouse motion for verbs like looking around:
your eyes pan slowly along the sprawl of the mysterious city in the distance. What secrets does
