Inspired by a comment on our latest jam game Radiant Rewind, I've been thinking about different controls for games...

I'll be using my own past Ludum Dare entries as examples, simply because they're the games I know best. The following thoughts should also be applicable to any other game nonetheless.

In the past few LD games I've been a part of making, we used different kinds of controls. My first two games, Spring Clean - DO NOT CROSS and Writespace, were keyboard-only, while the third one, Arden's Artisan Artefacts was playable using only the mouse.

So, Radiant Rewind is our first game that currently needs both a mouse (or similar pointing device) AND a keyboard to play it.

Sparked by a comment asking for keyboard or gamepad support, I'm thinking about adding keyboard controls for the player movement now, so that it would be playable without a mouse.

Thygrrr framed it as an accessibility need in their comment, and it seems obvious now that I think about it - some people can't use a mouse or just don't own one, and strongly prefer keyboard controls over using e.g. the touch pad on their laptop.

I think this is also a very subjective issue of personal preference.

For an action-packed game that needs quick reactions, if I can't have the intuitive movement tracking of VR controllers (my favorite way of playing video games), I generally prefer mouse-only controls, because I find it easier to focus when I'm not distracted by having to look away from the screen to find keys on my keyboard.

With that in mind, if I were making Spring Clean now, I would probably build it with mouse controls instead of keyboard - not doing that back then in 2017 was mainly because keyboard controls were just easier to implement and it was my first game jam ever. But as Spring Clean is still mostly a strategic puzzle game where quick reactions are helpful, but not the most important skill needed to play it, it's not that much of a problem to not have mouse controls.

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In puzzle games like Writespace, this is not a problem at all, because there is no time pressure, so being slow at typing isn't a disadvantage for the player. And of course the typewriter story/setting of Writespace would just not feel right with any other control than a keyboard anyway.

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As it relies a lot on quick and precise reactions, Radiant Rewind is a very different case.

In hindsight, I would kind of like to try and build a mouse-only version for my personal preference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txWLdFpt_Ro

But that would probably be quite tricky because of the limited amount of buttons on a mouse - and it feels ok to play with mouse and keyboard combined because the three most quickly needed keys can be reached with one hand, so I can play it with my right hand on the mouse and my left hand on the keyboard, one finger each on the ctrl, C and space keys.

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Now you probably also think that the perfect combination of the mouse's intuitive movement and the keyboard's less limited amount of buttons has already been invented - why don't I just use a gamepad?

Having grown up without any gaming consoles, I personally just never got used to playing with a gamepad - but apart from that, I think it could actually fit the needs of Radiant Rewind quite well. You could even try it out if you can configure your gamepad so one of the joysticks will move the mouse pointer and map the gamepad's keys to all the keyboard keys used by the game (ctrl, space, C, R, and P being the most important ones, with F and Esc just needed for resizing/closing the game window and numbers 1 to 6 for skipping directly into a level of your choice).

I'm curious now about building in native gamepad support and looking into LÖVE's possibilities for that. But that will probably take a while, so if you want to try our latest game and can't or don't want to use mouse and keyboard, you will need to have your gamepad configurable as described above.

Now that I've shared my thoughts on different controls for games, I would like to read yours.

Do you have a generally preferred way of controlling a game?
Do you choose the games you play based on the possible controls?
Are different keyboard layouts a possible problem for players in a different country?
What other accessibility issues do you see with different kinds of game controls?