On Monday of this week I showed my prototype to Aidan, an alumni from the year above who was visiting the studios at the time. They also experienced some difficulty with the controls, not knowing to hold the button to move at first. Something they suggested that could help would be two additions:
- An arrow in front of the player character that shows the direction the player has just tapped in (thus showing which way the character is ‘facing’)
- A system that buffers the next move and makes the player character move on the next beat if the player taps a direction.
Adding these two features may still cause players to continually tap the direction keys rather than hold them which could lead to fatigue and a lack of contrast with the different control method of the burst mode, but it would definitely be a good start I could then playtest and ask for feedback on.
Adding the triangle visually was simple as I could just add a 2D polygon in Godot that fit the size I wanted. I then used some badly written code to get the current direction relative to the player and rotate the triangle towards that direction.
Now the triangle moved according to player input and gave instant feedback, already making movement feel better and more intuitive.
To implement the second idea I had to add a new variable called buffered_move which is set when the player taps a key and is set back to null when the move is completed.
This worked and gameplay felt more responsive but still did not feel like it encouraged players to hold the direction keys to move. My next idea was to only show the direction pointer when the key is held.
I also added audio on sub-measures of beats to the rhythm system as well:
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