Supporting Alternate Control Schemes

This post is shadowed from our community forum Adventures in Lestoria Forum.

As I'm nearing the completion of many core features of our game there is one that was bothering me for a long time: Controller Gameplay. As a developer with a custom game engine, this is actually a very daunting challenge. Originally the intention of the menus in the game are designed with mouse and keyboard play in mind, and of course things work great with that control scheme. But I realized how comfortable it is to have a pick-up-and-play RPG game like ours use game controllers. And I'm sure there are plenty of gamers out there who prefer controllers when possible.

So I began the work of extending our game with controller functionality. For the core gameplay loop, using auto aiming (with the ability for a manual targeting system) seemed like the correct approach. By default the game makes a good guess on what target you are trying to kill, so you can focus on running around and smashing baddies!

Targeted attacks are automatically aimed to the nearest target with controller inputs.

You can also choose to manually aim with an analog stick. A targeting reticule appears!

When we got to the menus however, things were a bit more challenging... Take our inventory for example:

At first glance, this doesn't seem like anything too worrying, just move the cursor up and down with the DPad/analog stick and a button to go back! Done deal!

Here's our item loadout menu, and the consumable item selection window that follows:

Here's our overworld map screen:

I hope my point is starting to become a bit more obvious. I didn't realize how different each menu actually was from another menu... It's just not something you think about until you have to deal with it! Originally I built a system to auto-detect the positional relationship between each button, but in reality this doesn't really work out... Some things should be exempt from regular navigation, some should be assigned to shoulder buttons, etc...

Each menu has its own requirements! Its own method of navigating, and its own method of interacting with elements. It's actually fascinating to see how this all works during game development and hopefully it gave you some thought about it going forward as well!

How many different types of menus and menu layouts does your favorite game have? I hope you enjoyed this little excerpt. I will be pushing through all these menus throughout the week! Our game has 25 unique menus! Kind of crazy when I saw the final number.

In other news, we also have a mailing list now! Feel free to subscribe to receive updates on the game as we get closer to a public testing demo!