Understanding Players & Establishing Design Requirements Finally, we plan our next steps in usertesting and iteration to validate and refine our designs. Following this, we create our initial designs for three different player-controlled entities and refine them through early internal testing. Next, we formulate design requirements based on lessons learned from existing titles, expected use context, and player behaviours. The first step in our design process is the establishment of our target user population, and an understanding of player needs based on their demographics, preferences, and past experience. We’ve chosen to apply UCD in achieving these objectives to ensure that our players’ needs form the basis of our interaction design. Furthermore, many of our puzzles are physics-based, demanding that our controls seem physically realistic while maintaining a good game feel. Our need for great controller design is compounded by the nature of our project in particular since our core mechanic allows players to control a number of different objects, we may find ourselves designing a dozen control variants for any given input device. Poorly-mapped or unresponsive controls spell disaster for any platforming game, as they maximize player frustration, or worse, make certain challenges impossible to complete. Controls are of particular importance in the platforming genre, where players are frequently tasked with executing a precisely timed sequence of movement, jumps, and other abilities. Our team’s interest in UCD is motivated by our current project, a 3D puzzle-platformer in a quasi-open world. In this post, we’ll focus on how we can leverage the first two phases of UCD methodology – understanding needs and formulating requirements – to inform our designs pre-implementation.Ĭase Study: Designing Controls for Spirit In a nutshell, UCD focuses on understanding user needs, developing system requirements based on those needs, prototyping alternative designs, and finally evaluating the effectiveness of those designs. UCD is a process oft-applied in the realm of productivity and web applications, though it is increasingly applied to the development of interactive entertainment, including games. May we determine some aspects of our design a priori as a pre-development measure, thus improving the quality of our initial efforts? The answer, thankfully, is yes, through the application of user-centred design, or UCD. However, accurately measuring usability and user experience necessitates usertesting, which presumes that we’ve already implemented our design. Ultimately, this process boils down to the creation of an interaction schema that effectively maps real-world actions, such as a button press or a wave of the arm, into an in-game action, like jumping or swinging a sword.Īll of this rhetoric prompts us to inquire, how might we define good or great interaction design for game controls? We might assess a control scheme as effective if it is usable and contributes to a good user experience – that is to say, it enhances a player’s experience, rather than detracting from it. No matter the input chosen, developers are tasked with designing a set of controls that is logical, easy to learn, fluid, responsive, and as unobtrusive to gameplay as possible. This holds true regardless of input device – whether mouse and keyboard, gamepad, motion sensors, or brain-computer interface. Simply put, a game’s controls facilitate each and every interaction available to the player.
Controls are a fundamental aspect of any game’s design, serving as a key factor in determining the game’s playability. Who among us has never resorted to blaming the controller for our own failures? And yet, in some cases, perhaps we are justified in our rage against the machine, for a poor control implementation can lead to any manner of misclicks, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities.
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It’s a familiar image – the furious slamming of fists into a laggy keyboard the innocent mouse knocked aggressively from its perch the once-glorious gamepad, now laying cracked on the floor beneath a film of cheese dust.