The Diablo series’ extremely simple controls make them some of the easiest games to learn available. Pictured here: Diablo II.
A big part of designing a good mouse-based interface is making a system that does not look as sterile and business-like as theWindows file manager yet retains its ease of use.
Making the interface look attractive is mostly a matter of well-conceived art, but making it attractive without losing any of its intuitiveness and functionality can be quite challenging.
Whenever an artist suggests making a button look a certain way, the designer must consider if the new design takes away from the player’s ability to understand how that button works. Often, you can borrow clearly understood icons from other interfaces, either from other games or from real-world devices such as VCRs or CD players. For example, everyone knows what a “fast forward” symbol on an audio device looks like, and using this appropriately in your game will mean that players instantly know what a given button does.
Making buttons in your game that players can intuitively understand and that also look attractive is equal parts creativity and playtesting. If a majority of the people playtesting your game tell you your buttons are unobvious and confusing, they almost definitely are, and you need to return to the drawing board.
A common game design mistake is to try to include too much. This applies to all aspects of gameplay, but particularly to controls, where sometimes the cliché “less is more” really holds true. Every time you add a new button or key to your game, you must ask yourself if the complexity you have just added to the game’s controls is worth the functionality it
enables. When designing a PC game, the temptation is particularly great, since the
keyboard provides more keys than any game would ever need to use. Unfortunately, some games have tried to use nearly all of them, binding some unique function to practically each and every key. Complex keyboard controls favor expert players while alienating the novices, leading to a radically decreased number of people who might enjoy your game. Due to the limited number of buttons they provide, console control pads are much more limiting in what they will allow the designer to set up.
Unlike many other designers, particularly those making the switch from PC to console, I often feel that this limitation is a good one. Control pads force the designer to refine her controls, to cut away all that is extraneous, and to combine all of the game-world actions
players can perform into just a few, focused controls. This leads directly to games that are easier to learn how to play. Indeed, many of the most accessible console games do not even use all of the controller’s buttons. Because of the massive keyboard at their disposal, designers of PC games are not forced to focus the controls of their games in the same way, and I think their games may suffer for it. As I mentioned above, some of the most popular PC games have managed to squeeze all of their core controls into the mouse.
Much of the increasing complexity of game controls can be attributed to the increasing dominance of RT3D games. These games, by trying to include the ability for the player’s game-world surrogate to move forward and backward, up and down, sideways left and right, turn left and right, and pitch up and down, have already used a massive number of controls while only allowing players to move in the game-world and do nothing else. In many ways, the perfect way to simply and intuitively control a character with total freedom in 3D space is still being explored. This is why for some time very few of the successful 3D
games released allowed players total freedom to control their character. With the console success of complex first-person shooter-style games such as Halo and Medal of Honor:
Frontlines, players seem to have grown accustomed to the intricacies of freely moving and looking around in an elaborate 3D environment. Nevertheless, in order to allow players a fighting chance, the most popular 3D games, such as The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto III, and Tomb Raider, continue to restrict player character movement to a ground plane.
StarCraft provides the player with a very elegant interface which allows her to issue orders to her units using a variety of techniques.
One technique that can be used to make your controls intuitive to a variety of playersis to include multiple ways to achieve the same effect. For instance, if one looks at the interface used by the RTS game StarCraft, players are able to control their units by left-clicking to select the unit, then clicking on the button of the action they want the unit to perform, and then left-clicking on a location in the world where they want the unit to perform that action.
Players can also left-click on the unit to select it and then immediately right-click in the game-world, causing the unit to do the most logical action for the location the players
clicked, whether it means moving to that point or attacking the unit there. Furthermore, StarCraft also allows players to access a unit’s different actions through a hot key instead of clicking on the button. This has the pleasant side effect of keeping the interface simple enough for novice players to handle, since it is all point-and-click, while the expert players can spend their time memorizing hot keys in order to improve their game. In many console action games, different buttons on the controller will perform the same action. A common choice to make, particularly on PlayStation games, is to allow players to control character movement through either the left directional pad or through the left analog control stick.
Crash Bandicoot, for instance, allows players to move with either the directional pad or the analog stick, and also allows players to access Crash’s ability to slide by pressing either a trigger button or one of the buttons on top of the controller. Providing multiple ways for players to achieve a single game-world action helps to ensure that a given player will enjoy using one of the ways you have provided.
There is a lot of room for creativity in game design, but control design is not one of the best areas to exercise your creative urges. Your game should be creative in its gameplay, story line, and other content, but not necessarily in its controls. Some of the most successful games have taken control schemes that players were already familiar with from other
games and applied them to new and compelling content. Sometimes the established control scheme may be weak, but often it is not weak enough to justify striking out in an entirely new direction with your own control system. As a designer you must weigh what is gained through a marginally superior control scheme with what is lost because of player confusion.
For example, Sid Meier’s fine RTS game Gettysburg! included as its default method for ordering troops around a “click-and-drag” system instead of the established “click-and-click”
system found in other games. His system was quite creative and actually may have been a better way of controlling the game than the established paradigms. However, it was not so much better that it outweighed the confusion players experienced when first attempting to play the game, a fact he admits in the interview included in Chapter 2 of this book. Console games are particularly good at providing uniform control schemes, with fans of games in a particular genre able to pick up and immediately start playing almost any game available in the genre, even if they have never seen it before.
During the course of the development of a game, as you are playing the game over and over and over again, it is very easy to get accustomed to bad controls. Though the controls may be poorly laid out or counterintuitive, as a game’s designer working on a project for several years, you may have used the controls so much that they have become second nature. However, as soon as others play the game for the first time, they will quickly be frustrated by these controls and are likely to stop playing as a result. Indeed, when I ran Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates a few years after it shipped, I was immediately stunned at how bizarre and disorienting the controls were, particularly the ability to look left and right on the PS2’s right analog stick. Other members of the team I showed it to were similarly shocked. “We shipped it like that?” they said incredulously. Over the course of three years developing the game, we had grown familiar with the game’s oddities and the controls seemed fantastic. With some distance between ourselves and the game, we were able to
see its glaring control problems. Ideally, a proper playtesting phase will include many players playing the game for the first time, and witnessing their initial reaction to the
controls is crucial to understanding how intuitive your controls really are. Do not think, “Oh, she’ll get used to it,” or “What an idiot! These controls are obvious; why can’t she see that!”
or “Well, I like them the way they are.” Instead think, “Why are my controls bad and what can I do to fix them?”
Designing controls that players will find intuitive can be quite challenging, especially with such a variety of control setups for different games, particularly in the PC market. For example, back when the FPS genre was first establishing itself, it was hard to determine what the “standard” controls for an FPS should be since the last three successful FPS games had all employed unique control schemes. Thankfully, over time, the controls became standardized, and now fans of shooting mayhem are easily able to jump into almost any FPS they come across. Almost every PC action game released in the last
decade allows players to configure the controls however they desire, and this is an absolute must for any PC game that demands players manipulate a large number of buttons. That said, many players never find or use the control configuration screens, either because of a desire to start playing the game immediately or a general lack of savvy with the computer.
Many, many players will be left playing with whatever the default keys are, and this is why it is the designer’s job to make sure these default settings are as playable as possible. Here, following the standard set by most other games is very important. You should never use a strange or confusing set of default controls for your game merely because the programmer in charge likes it that way or the team has grown accustomed to them. Always make sure the default controls are as intuitive as possible, and if this involves shameless imitation, so be it.
When the attempt to have unique controls did not work out as planned, The Suffering was changed to emulate control systems from other games.
Making a game in an established genre is one thing, but when it comes to developing a game that tries to do something substantially new with what actions players can perform, there is no way to avoid spending a lot of time on the controls. After you get them so you
like them, you must put them in front of players to see how well they work in practice
instead of theory. Trying out brave new control styles is a noble endeavor, but you will need to make sure players actually prefer them to more traditional methods. And as you gather their feedback, long-term iteration is all but unavoidable. One example of this happened on my game The Suffering. The game was a shooter and we wanted to make it as console- friendly as possible, and thereby took Devil May Cry as a source of inspiration. At the same time, we wanted players to have the freedom to move through the environment and position and orient their camera like in first-person shooters or, specifically, Syphon Filter and our own Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates. So we developed a hybrid targeting system that provided players with intuitive movement through the world with a single thumb stick, but then allowed for simple targeting of enemies. We spent a long time developing this system and iterating on it, and felt we had done a pretty good job. Then we started hearing
grumblings from fellow developers we showed the game to that the controls seemed odd.
When we finally put the game in front of players their feedback almost universally
mentioned the controls as what they liked least about the game. We tried tweaking it a bit more, showed it to some more players, and found that the controls still seemed odd. At this point we were fairly far into development and realized that the innovative control scheme we had attempted simply was not working out. Since it was the control system we were having a problem with, we decided it made the most sense to imitate some existing control
schemes. We wanted something powerful that we knew players would be familiar with, so we copied the two-analog-stick scheme that most of the other current console shooters, including Max Payne and Halo, were using. At this point we were imitating instead of
innovating, but when we put the game in front of players again with our new control scheme they almost all praised the quality of our controls and then were able to focus their
complaints on other aspects of the game.
Particularly in action games, when your controls are perfect, the wall separating players from the game-world will disappear and they will start to feel like they truly are the game- world character. This is the ultimate sign of an immersive game, and achieving this effect is impossible without strong controls. In a game where that level of immersion is possible, the controls must be completely invisible to players. This can be frustrating to a designer. Why work so hard on something that, if implemented perfectly, will be completely invisible? The designer must realize that it is the transparency of controls that allows players to enjoy the rest of what the game has to offer.