VERBS AND OBJECTS - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 29

(And interestingly, Bubble Ghost was itself grafted back onto a four-way D-pad in a 1990 version

for the Game Boy. Unsurprisingly, it loses something: allowing the player to move at a fixed
speed means that lining up and aiming is both easier and less nuanced.)

As a creator, you should always consider the properties of any method of input you're designing
for, even if, for whatever reason, the choice isn't yours. I've played a million attempts at Super
Mario Bros. -style games on the iPad touchscreen that try to reproduce the same controls as the
game they're imitating: left and right movement “buttons” on the left, and two “action” buttons
on the right. There's no textural distinction between the two action “buttons,” as there would
be if they were two keys, so it's hard to hit “the left action button” or “the right action button”
with any degree of consistency. And any motion that moves the player's fingers too far out of

the corners obscures the screen—the information the player is relying on.

The most effective games of this kind pare down the player's verb set until only two binary
inputs are needed: either the player's left thumb is on the screen or it isn't, and either the
player's right thumb is on the screen or it isn't. In 1-Bit Ninja (2012), the protagonist moves

forward when the left side of the screen is touched and jumps when the right side of the screen
is touched (see Figure ). The player doesn't use the touchscreen to choose the protago-

nist's direction of horizontal motion: rather, there are in-game objects that flip the protagonist
around if

2.11

she touches them. Design for a game's means of input, not against it.

Figure 2.11 Two different models of touchscreen input, one designed a little more consciously of

being on a touchscreen.

Be aware of the properties of a form of input before designing a physical layer for your verb.
A computer's arrow keys and the plus-shaped “directional pad” of a Nintendo controller might
seem the same, but there's a fundamental difference. The keys are four independent binary
states, whereas the “d-pad” is a single piece of plastic—it can be depressed left or right and up
or down (two axes of movement), but the player can't depress left and right at the same time.

There's an enforced exclusion in the d-pad that makes sense in games about spatial navigation
in two dimensions—after all, what does left and right simultaneously mean in terms of that

movement? They cancel each other out.

But other contexts have a use for them. Dance Dance Revolution ( DDR , 1998), a Simon Says game
that players play with their feet on giant d-pads, occasionally gives players a Left and Right
command or an Up and Down command simultaneously. These require the player to jump into