Hello everyone!

So I’m super-thrilled that people have been getting in to Total Spaghettification, a lot of people have ‘clicked’ with the mechanics and have been perfecting their runs through the game.

There’s one point of contention that is proving to be an annoyance to people, and that’s arguably the most important part of any game: the controls!

Why are they so weird? Well:

I knew early on I wanted to strip the game controls down to a minimum. Canabalt + Nikujin was the base equation, and I wanted to experiment with not having the usual directional controls. I liked the idea in my head of the lil’ guy just charging around like a Lemming until exploding, and I felt that if you were flowing well enough in the game, just bouncing off walls like a pinball would be enough!

So as I started to put together the movement controls I went with an ‘A’ button to jump and wall-slide, ‘B’ button to floor-slide and dismount from walls. I developed most of the game like this, and got used to the way they worked.

Late on Sunday, I showed it to my partner and quickly found out that the controls were a useless mess, with no flow or form, and only served to make a frustrating game more difficult. Whoops.

So I spent a few hours furiously re-writing the movement logic, and settled on the ass-backwards way that it currently plays – different keys for jumping in different contexts. It was the only way I could get the game to feel like it was flowing again, as doing a succession of wall jumps was just impossible with the jump/wall-jump being on the same key!

I thought it was a fair compromise – if you managed to get to grips with the controls it would be rewarding, but there was a huge danger that I was asking players to get used to an unnatural control scheme, on top of being pressured by the time limit and fall damage. It’s like saying “Hey, I know you’ve got a bus to catch, but would you mind filling in this survey? Also we’re standing next to a wasp’s nest.”

This might have worked out better had I had time to implement a proper tutorial. In fact, this all served to highlight some major flaws in my development skills – how to best teach the player how the mechanics work in a way that is fun and compelling. I just banged in a practice level with no time limit to try and address the problem, which again was a compromise as time was running out, but it probably wasn’t enough overall to address the issue.

All of this is a perfect storm in the kind of environment were people don’t really have time to learn a whole wacky set of controls when going through and rating 100s of games. And not making the controls intuitive enough is a failing on my part, and a lesson for me to take away from this!