I'm Just Going to Write
Dec 01, 2015
Not sure what to write about this week. So much is happening, but so much of it is spoilers. I think this week I'll do a little free writing. As I type these very words, I have no idea what this post is going to be about.
We've done three playtests so far and all of them have produced great information. The most encouraging part is they are producing roughly the same results. Players are liking and getting stuck on the same things. Those are easy problems to fix.
We did a little redesigning of the first 15 minutes of the game and added a simple two character puzzle to help teach that you can switch characters and that it's needed, not just a fancy back of the box bullet point. It also makes the very beginning of the game a little more interesting because you're doing some simple puzzle solving before being plummeted into the story.
The other thing we learned is that some of our dialogs are too long, so we're going through a pruning phase. Players thought the dialogs were funny and interesting, but there was too much information in there and it became easy to tune out. It doesn't matter how good, useful or funny your writing is if players are just skipping it faster then they can read it.
I half-expected this, but wanted to watch some players to make sure. I often know something is wrong, but I need to see it.
There is also a funny/creepy little gag that happens right at the beginning that everyone missed. If you miss it, the game becomes temporarily confusing, so we cut the gag. We'll probably reuse it later when it's not critical if players miss it.
David and I were chatting on Slack last night about keyboard controls. One of the questions raised during the playtest was if you'll be able to hit keys to select verbs. It was always our intention, but we hadn't figured out how to lay it out.
I as favoring a grid layout, where the top left verb was ‘Q' and the next over was ‘W', etc. David was arguing for Open being ‘O', Close being ‘C', use being ‘U", etc. Whenever these types of discussions happen was always ask "What would Lucasfilm Games do?", so we busted out the old Lucasfilm game manuals to take a look. Turns out we did it both ways back then.
The first letter matching the verb has some issues, mainly Push, Pull and Pickup. It also has the translation problem. How did the translated versions of old Lucasfilm Games deal with that? Was it successful? What is your preferred approach to mapping keys to verbs? Do you care?
I'm the wrong person to ask, since I never use the keyboard. I was the only person in my World of Warcraft guild to do hardcore raiding and never use the keyboard. I am a mad mouse clicker. It's both a curse and blessing and a burden I live with.
Of course, the keyboard will be fully remappable, so you will be able to assign them to anything you want, but the default settings should feel good for most players.
Thoughts?
- Ron
also: great post, need moar, need game now, blah blah etc etc :)
You should ask it to the fans, you'd get a billion geeky replies!!! ;-D
PS (I'm pretty sure which game is the first, at least)
:-)
For the first, it's the only game to have "Turn on", "Turn off", but no "What is". Later versions of that game ditched the first two verbs as well.
The second game is the only one to have "Fix" and "Unlock".
The verbs are in a 3x3 grid, but if you 'think' of it as a wheel instead of a grid, by holding down a combination of WSAD or arrow keys to select the cardinal direction of the verb. - so 'UP + LEFT' = top left verb, etc, you can select verbs without having to search for a particular key, or knowing where your fingers were in the grid layout.
I think it's a little more intuitive than requiring the use of 9 separate keys.
I've was even bored enough to make a prototype using JQuery - you can try it out on my website here: http://cyrus5.co.uk/verbselection/
Some food for thought :)
Grid layout is of course simpler and easier and arguably more intuitive, however it's 'hardcore' I'd associate with fast-action strategy games, not with easy contemplation adventure games to be honest.
In general I do think keyboard makes sense although there's no need to shortcut for rapid action (as there's no rapid action involved in the game), but once you start iterating permutations (which is probably inevitable in P&C adventure games no matter how hard you try to avoid it) it becomes convenient to not have to travel your pointer across the grid in a random access fashion.
Cheers,
Ralph
I was wondering, would it be possible to map both the verbs and the dialogue choices to the numbers of the keypad? After all while you're talking you can't also be using verbs (or CAN YOU?). Just out of curiosity, I'm not sure I would even use it if it was available.
Mapping to QWERTY feels like it would work fine for options on the left edge, but I'd have to do a little calculation in my head each time for the others:
"ok I want to unlock it, that's the second row, 3rd column..."
*looks down to keyboard*
"...ah ok it's D".
Doesn't feel like a shortcut, and are we going to be playing the game long enough to make it worthwhile learning random letter associations?
Personally, I think the positions of the verbs onscreen don't really make any intrinsic sense, so I would prefer mnemonic-based shortcuts for the default, and maybe a hint (e.g. hold down the command key or whatever and each verb gets a key cap with the key to press overlaid). If people prefer a physical arrangement, they can always customize it, but for most players it will just be: "The first letter, except Push and Pull, which are _S_hove and _Y_ank, and Turn Off and Turn On where it's the last letter."
In the end, you'll have to work this out with your localizers: "Pick keys easy to press on your keyboard, and if there are duplicates, use last letter or letters of similar words."
Although now I think about it some more, I think I may have seen them when playing Sam & max, but even there I didn't memorize them, and instead justused the mouse. I think you could use right-click to switch through the verbs, but that doesn't really scale well to more than 4.
(I'd also expect that this way, you could give an on-screen hint as to what it is if you chose - say, by underlining the key which is the shortcut - like what Windows does)
I'm likely to switch between keyboard and mouse based on what seems right at the time. Most times I might click the verb, but sometimes push the letter. I'm only likely to push the letter if I can guess what it's going to be.
Not to mention that, with verbs translated in Italian, the "first letter" making method is nonsense.
In Monkey Island, "Apri" was mapped to O (Open), "Raccogli" was mapped to P (pick up). There is not even a letter in common. I used the keyboard over the mouse for selecting verbs, because the mouse searches the objects in the scene, and the fingers type the verbs.
Please keep in mind that keyboard layout is not QWERTY everywhere. As mentioned before, German keyboard has Y changed, while French keyboard is QZERTY. But this is easy to fix: the languages are only five!
So I would say go for the grid layout, but please keep in mind that some people have different keyboard layouts, some of them really weird.
Also: grid layout is a no brainer: No translation problems, no p-issue and if remapping is available, everybody should be happy.
So for me first letters (or last where verbs match as pick, pull push) would be a nice pick and Q-A seem great to skip forward/backward verbs.
And, hey, thanks for asking.
Only Z and Y are reverse in SwissFrench keyboard (QWERTZ) i use but it's not a problem for me.
It could be some problems with French keyboard in AZERTY.
Are there any situations in this game where you can both push and pull at the same thing?
If not, wouldn't it be more intuitive to make that as 1 verb?
The same for Turn on/off: if something is turned on, why would you want to again turn it on?
Such verbs can easily (or with some small effort maybe) be made into 1 verb, or 'action' if you will. It will also free some 'slots' which you can use for other verbs if you will..... And, you don't have the problem of duplicated begin letters for keyboard control (and/or translations).
Since I use it seldom, I always preferred those games in which "O" stands for "open" and so on, since it is difficult to look for the position of the key on the keyboard to match the position of the verb on the interface.
I have a question and maybe a suggestion about the "missing gag". One of the problems I often found in many point and click adventure games is that it is not clear what you are expected to do in the immediate. And often it is because you missed some key point.
So the suggestion is to find a way either to "force" the gag, or to explain to the players what he should do or what is happening in the plot in another way. So the gag will just be optional, like an easter egg.
The question, indeed, was: if missing the gag makes the game confusing, simply "cutting" it wouldn't make the game confusing as well? Maybe I didn't understand what you mean...
So it is confusing if you see the gag, not if you miss it. I didn't got it.
What about making the layout selectable in the game options? It should be easy to achieve, a lot of games has key mapping....
Most RTS sequels today favour the grid layout over the old letter matching and it translates much better.
(For example DotA1(keys spread everywhere) -> Dota2(QWER))
If you rearrange Close and Push you can have the grid layout and the Letter matching as default.
[O]pen [P]ickUp [L]ookAt
[U]se Pu[s]h Pull(y)
[G]ive [T]alkTo [C]lose
It keeps the left hand stationary above the keys while having the right hand for the mouse. You could consider adding a similar preset on the right side of the keyboard for lefties, I guess.
Beside the localization problem, the "O for Open" layout didn't ever really work for me because my none-mouse hand had to jump over the whole keyboard. "Walk" and "Open"/"Pick up" are way apart. I ultimately used the mouse for verb selection because of that. Sorry, David. :)
That way, you also don't have any problems when you change some verbs temporarily (i.e., in a shop, pick up and give become buy and sell, like in Zak) or for comic effect (Guybrush petting the bird in Meathook's house).
Personally, I use the mouse almost exclusively, but if there is a puzzle where you need to do the same action repeatedly, the keyboard can be very handy. The best example is Indy III, where you have to move the chair you are tied to across the room by pushing/pulling it.
Did you say you were going to implement verb-switching via mouse controls? Right-click cycles through verb commands? Mouse wheel scrolls inventory?
Have you given much more thought to how the game will control via touch screen? Game controller? Are you leaning towards implementing direct movement of the character with the controller stick (and use the other stick for mouse movement)?
On an unrelated side note: Have you or have you considered implementing distance-based conditions when interacting with objects? Meaning, if you are farther away from a selected object, the results of your verb commands may be different. Can you think of any interesting puzzles you could do with that? Would you then have the need to implement a way to decide if the player would automatically walk to an object to interact with? Just a thought.
The main problem is with games. Often, i start a game, then, if I need to use the keyboard, close it, switch to the US English keyboard and start the game again. Often, switching layouts once the game has started does not work. The worse, oddly enough, has recently been when I was using OS X Mavericks for VNC as a client to use Windows 8 remotely. Unless I switched back to the US keyboard, I simply had no access to digits at all.
Some games a programmed... How can I put this in a non-judgmental way..? Stupidly. They use the character on the keyboard. So "W" becomes "Z" in French and "W" becomes "Z" in German. SOME game companies (let's not name names and promote Valve like a shameless fanboy here) use character positions instead. So instead of using "W" for "forward" they use the character two positions left from tab. (I actually don't know the code for that. It must change from engine to engine and from OS to OS, but it exists. I've seen it.) It's a small thing but it makes life for people who don't use EXCLUSIVELY US keyboards so much more pleasant.
O[p]en [P]ick Up [P]ush
Close u[p] Look U[p]on [P]ull
[P]resent S[p]eak A[p]ply
Good post. You should do free writing more often.
"Players are liking ... the same things. Those are easy problems to fix." ;) That's good to hear. If players were getting constantly stuck on different things, the puzzles might be too difficult or illogical, which could mean bigger overhaul which could take resources from other things and potentially push back the launch.
Keyboard controls: do both and then some. There could maybe be three selectable mappings (e.g. QWEASDZXC, initials and numeric keyboard for those keyboards that has it), and option for user remappable keys. And maybe a text parser :) Personally, I'm not going to touch the keyboard. With the exception of full stop key to skip dialogs already read.
Also, apologies for straying off-topic into WoW-details. The reason for my comment is basically down to personal preferences of having key-binds clumped up close by each other instead of spread out for efficiency.
One hand in the mouse for pixel hunting and point and click to move the character around and the other hand in the keyboard to select verbs. The problem with so many verbs is that one has to 'navigate the keyboard' to press the right key for the action. What I would like to is be able to quickly navigate the verbs on the screen with W A S D (or the arrow keys if you use the mouse with your left hand). I know this might not be for everyone but would love to see this as an option...
Thanks for asking for feedback on this Ron.
Quite frankly I don't I'll be using it, having a mouse. However, back on the C64 I used it, since the joystick movements were slower.
"Use the numpad, Luke".
Then: the first time the player presses any key, present him with both layouts and let him choose one, and inform him that he can always change it later through the settings.
I don't have my manuals handy but as far as I recall all of the monkey island games and DOTT used the first letter (ish) layout.
It looks like the grid is from maniac mansion, which I played on NES, so maybe it was only used once and then abandoned?
They changed it with later games like Monkey Island and DOTT but then the company was called LucasArts already.
Games like Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and Indy3 used grid based layout and there was not really another way to map ~15 verbs more easily.
Later games with reduced verbs made it more easy to use the other approach. (Nowadays there are many "adventure" games with two- or even one-lick interfaces...)
I definitely prefer grid because I don't like to have to move my hand all over the keyboard (e.g. W - walk, O - open, C - close)
Re cutting down dialogue, I wish the makes of Flight of the Amazon Queen had done this. The game was let down by the annoying dialogue. There was also a discworld game back in the 90s. This was even worse because you couldn't skip dialogue / cutscenes at all. And those scenes were just not funny. At all. Attempts at humour that aren't funny are worse than boring dialogue. I doubt you are at risk of this however, because, Monkey Island didn't suffer from this at all. And I usually am not a fan of American comedy.
For me one of the attractions to the genre is the fact that you can just play it with a mouse, reclinin' away.
BTW: Any chance of doing an experimental setup with voice commands or e.g. Kinect input? You could then e.g. advertise the game in a late eighties kind of way, similar to e.g. the Nintendo Power Glove. I would totally buy that ;-)
I agree that the dialogs shouldn't be too long.
The [ E R T / D F G / C V B ] block for verbs, coupled with [ S / X ] for scrolling the inventory, works on QWERTY, QWERTZ, ans AZERTY.
If you keep a 4x2 inventory, you could use [ YZ U I O / H J K L ] for the objects. You must bind both Z and Y to the first object for that layout to be universal. It can be a peculiarity of the default bindings, there's no need to allow users to specify more than one key if they customize it (For Dvorak and other alternative layout users, mostly... Or and [O]pen, [U]se, etc. lovers...).
Depending on the number of dialog choices, you could map them as well, or not....
Using the numbers for the inventory doesn't work well on AZERTY because you must use SHIFT to produce numbers. I used the keyboard shortcuts as much as possible back then (even though they were a bit arbitrary in French, and AZERTY) but I never discovered that the inventory was available that way in MI (but then, I didn't have the booklet, maybe I should have bought the game :-).
Alternatively, you can offer presets for major variations. But then, please keep it to the alphabetical keys. For example, the Belgian keyboard uses AZERTY like the French one, but the non-alphabetical keys are shuffled.
---------
At last, you could rely on scancodes for the default configuration. They are layout independent, but
1) I think there are differences between Macs and PCs (and aparently between AT/PS2 and USB keyboards),
2) I think SDL dropped scan code support when v2 came out,
3) It makes it hard to build a consistent UI for describing and customizing them (unless you use [ert dfg cvb s x] and the number keys, which would work fine if you used scan codes).
DOSBox, which is still using the SDL 1.x branch normalizes the scan codes across platforms to provide them as DOS apps expect them, and it's open source. There may be wisdom to be gleaned from there. If you want, I know the authors and I can ask them for help navigating the source.
Replies are the only interactive items during dialogs, shortcuts are less important there.
PICK UP: BackSpace
USE: Enter
WALK: SpaceBar
OPEN: 0
CLOSE: 1
TALK TO: any letter
LOOK AT: *
GIVE: /
PUSH: +
PULL: -
SWITCH CHARACTER: Tab
F- Turn Off; U - Unlock; K - Look at; C - Close
Or grid. Grid works.
1. Use the Numpad as a grid for verbs (789, 456, 123), nr for conversation selection (1-6)
2. select the verbs with only 3 keys: 1 times q = open, 2 times q = pick up, 3 times q = push, ... -> less keys in use and faster :) just cycle through the verbs
Stupid ideas? It's late :) But as most people mentioned I would prefer the grid idea as well: translation of verbs and "english" layout for keys does not match very good.
Does that make sense?
At the beggining of game you can show a selector with both images of key mappings and let the user decide. Even you can add one option more that says:
"Fuck! These mappings are a piece of shit. Let me to decide!"
1. Capital (e.g. P = pick up, W = Walk to, L = Look at, etc.)
2. Keyboard Layout (the second option Ron Gilbert was talking about where the keyboard visually matched the verbs layout)
3. Custom (whatever you want)
I think this will be the best option.
If the dialogues seem overly long to native English speaking people they most certainly are to non-English speaking people.
I live in Denmark. I prefer puzzles that are mainly item/inventory based. Of course we need dialogue to move the story forward. But if the story is complex with lots of dialogue with many of the puzzles "hidden" in the story they "vanish" due to the language barrier.
Danish is a small language so we never get to see movies in the cinema with dubbed sound. It's all original audio and Danish subtitles. That makes us rather good at speaking English.
Many people would say "I can easily watch an american film and not read the subtitles". But it often turns out that if you actually do watch a movie without subtitles you loose a lot of info if the plot is just a little complicated.
Yes, there are subtitles in Thimbleweed Park but they are English too. That's fine. I really like them and they make sure I understand the voiceover completely. But still. It's a foreign language.
Please make sure not to do overly long dialogues.
Can't wait to play the game. It's going to be THE game of the year!
If you weren't the demi-god of point-and-click I'd have not believed you :D
Keyboard controls: mnemonic controls (first letter, or first distinct letter) matter for accessibility reasons.
I'd therefore always choose mnemonic keyboard controls in this kind of game, unless there's an action-packed sequence. In that case, it might be best to turn it into a non-standard minigame (think the hovercraft sequence in *cough*space quest*cough*), where the controls are tuned to the minigame.
In terms of translation, I think it's better not to introduce this kind of complexity. Nobody wants to be diving in to code they have forgotten about when it comes around to doing additional translations down the line. Translations should be text only, not key mapping.
The grid option obviously comes in tops in terms of logical use but what about a third option, a single key that cycles through the verbs?
And I did play the old LucasArts games using keyboard shortcuts, so I could probably still do it by memory. (All the ones I played back then, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, used the initial system.)
So, nice to have for others maybe.
I would implement it as in the classics to avoid frustration and give the (oldschool)-players what they expecting or familiar with.
I used the keyboard shortcuts to select verbs, scrolled through the inventory etc. because moving the cursor from and to the verb section all the time wasn't efficient.
I like the idea of the onscreen verbs having tool-tips (or similar) indicating which key is mapped to each verb. Pressing one of the mapped keys would make the tips appear, and clicking on one of the on-screen verbs would switch them off again, so they adjust to what the player's doing (or they could be set to always on or off in the options).
The numpad layout is very useful because you can keep the gui image in your mind and your fingers will find exactly the same image on the keyboard in the minimum space. The first letter layout will be good for nostalgic and words lovers and the qwe asd zxc grid will work for keyboards without numpad. And you don't have to translate anything!!! Ehehe
They chose it to eliminate verbs, but this is an "adventure WITH verbs". So why add also that awkward UI which is typical of adventures with no verbs? If you want to play TP, you have to play with verbs, not with scrolling icons or moving rectangular shapes.
Or is it?
Quick Javascript Prototype: http://cyrus5.co.uk/pages/verb-selection.html
Gets around the localisation problem, key searching, or not knowing where your fingers are in the 3x3 grid.
I already posted this as a reply earlier, but the conversation seems to be in bottom posting :)
But it does not work for me for 2 main reasons: 1) you need to "hold" the keys rather than just one quick press, which is a bit annoying, and 2) the center verb selection is not very intuitive.
So, I still think a simple grid would work better
I'd even like there to be a key for walk left / right / up / down. (and separate key bindings for move cursor left/right/up/down). Not that I'd use that that much, but for the moments when I'm taking a drink with might right hand, could make a little progress. That's multi-tasking! :)
i prefer grid because you have short ways for the fingers and you can do it without looking on the keyboard.
The walk through on Zak actually appeared in Zzap!64 magazine in July and October 1989. The review was in March issue.
(See previous post comments for context)
Meanwhile, while visiting the in-laws in the Phoenix area, I had to do a double take when I came across this sign while out for a run:
http://www.pawinskiphotography.com/public/tumbleweedpark.jpg
Or ALT =Pull, F4 = Push. Try Pull and Push together.
For the commandline lovers :)
Pretty please? With sugar on top?
It could be an additional turn-on/turn-off feature and would be awesome.
And it's open source, copy-paste ; ))