Lmk if space to fire and shift for map makes more sense
I wanted it to feel natural for qwerty and arrow key controls, the space felt a little clunky with arrow keys.
Lmk if space to fire and shift for map makes more sense
I wanted it to feel natural for qwerty and arrow key controls, the space felt a little clunky with arrow keys.
Shift has the problem of bringing up windows sticky keys dialog box if you tap it too fast. Spacebar was my instinct for fire key as well. For map it would be 'M'.
Whichever you choose, please consider displaying the controls inside the game, at least during the setup screen, don't make the user search for controls in the wiki. :)
Also the hp bar below the minimap is a bit weird, would expect it the same as enemy ships above my ship, so i can see if i'm winning or losing a cannon exchange like in a rts game. Or at least someplace more convenient to quickly glance at nearer the center of the screen.
Very fun game by the way, well done! Scratches the nostalgia itch of 'Corsairs Gold' for me.
Space was definitely what I pressed first to fire. Then enter. Then shift. Later I realized the menu has the key bindings in it.
Tab and M for map, WASD and arrows for controls, space to fire seems like a good compromise
I’ll be making this change!
Though I’m worried it’s gonna be tougher for people to find the map and ship logs since space is a natural button to try and press early on
As others mention, show the keys in the interface. It took me a while to discover accidentally, by pressing space, that I can trim the sails. You could make a graphical guide, showing a ship with arrows around, some arrows attached to the hull with keys responsible for turning the ship, some arrows attached to sails with keys responsible for trimming them. Yet another key by the cannons fire to show which key... umm... fires the cannons...
The whole thing should ideally have a quick modal with hotkeys when you first open it (and a small button to bring it up again if needed).
Modals are the worst ux in games.
If it's only a few buttons anyway you can just show them somewhere as hints while the user isn't giving input or until they used then.
Eg just show a "m for Map\nspace to fire" until the user used each, hiding them each when the m/space is used respectively for that session (session storage so it shows up again if the user comes back later)
Space to me means fire.
You can show the mini-map in a corner, right? Why do you need to toggle it, Slither has it shown at all times.
I agree minimap on corner is ideal, but it does make it easier in a way
I also tried using the space bar to fire, it took a bit of digging to realize it was the shift key, but space bar felt more natural for me.
My first instinct was space to fire FWIW (Also its giving me Age of Empire feels here!)
Space for fire, I kept hitting it reflexively.
Space to fire would be my preference as well.
Shift doesn't make sense as a main key almost at all tbh.
Space to fire makes more sense than shift to fire
Edit: Shift is a modifier key. Hold shift to go from lowercase -> capitals. In FPS games shift is walking -> running. In RTS games shift is "select one of these units -> select all of these units"
I know your game doesn't have to follow these rules, you can do whatever you want. However it's worth thinking about what "language" each key on the keyboard is speaking when you want to use it.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. Never thought about shift being a modifier key from a UX perspective, I’ll likely make space to fire and move map to M because of this thread. Thanks guys!
This will make it a lot more intuitive to play