Devlog #30: Gamepad

Thirty devlogs, damn! I’m happy with myself that I’ve stayed committed to these. ...Shame that this week’s is an underwhelming one.
This week was one of my classic gamedev ruts where it’s hard to find the motivation, but I managed to push through it and make some progress (although not much of what I had planned)

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Last Week’s Goals-

-Yusuke in party: Didn't make much progress from last week
-Abu in party: started the sprites and design but nothing implemented
-Momo’s POW: nope
-Ayumu’s POW: designed and prototyped, but too ugly for a devlog yet

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Gamepad and Input swapping-

Early in the week I felt the rut coming and decided to pivot to something I’ve been putting off. It’s a tactic that’s worked for me in the past; if I’m forcing myself to work on the game I may as well be forcing myself to do something tedious. So I finally added gamepad support!

I planned out the button layout very early on and have made sure that things work conceptually with a controller as I’ve added new stuff, and it definitely paid off this week. Still, it was a lot more work than I expected and plenty tedious.

But now the game works with a Switch Pro controller (my preferred and what I always use on PC), and xbox and playstation support in the works.

I’m using Juju Adams and Alynne Keith’s Input system, which basically does all the hard stuff for you. It supports almost every controller available and allows for easy input swapping, and it works great. But the hard part for me is I had to redraw all of my sprites and rework some stuff like SPIN, because all the prompt markers are manually drawn sprites due to the limited resolution. It's a pain, but I prefer it this way because I have more control over the visuals.

Keeping with the limited resolution and colour palette, I’ve also limited the number of buttons needed to play. So unless I need to add any more buttons, the game can be played with even an SNES controller.

Here’s some images of the game UI with controller input:

SPIN prompts have a direct alternate prompt for each keyboard prompt (10 possible on each) so they can be interchanged whenever without having to be reworked.

In place of the arrow keys, you dodge with the direction using ABXY on gamepad. Hopefully this doesn't cause future issues, but I always planned it to be this way so it works well for now.

(Menu is still a WIP, but I also don't have any ideas for what to do with it so it may just end up being this in the final game)

I would like to add key bindings, but I think it might be too difficult for me as a solo dev. I think I’ll wait and see if it’s something anybody requests before I spend way too long attempting it.

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Little Demo Update

With controller support added I’d like to do another small update to the demo, and while I’m there I’ll add the new sound effects. Not sure when I’ll release it but hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.

Other than that there’s not much to show off this week, so I’ll leave it there. I’m housesitting for a friend this week and I’ll have the place to myself so I’m very tempted to try a video devlog for the first time. Now that twitter is dead, it’s hard to get new eyes on my game and Youtube seems like the best option now. I don't like editing and loathe public speaking so there’s a good chance I’ll drop the idea, but I'm gonna keep my "To do this week" section blank to try and spur myself on. Either way, next week's written devlog will be about Ayumu's POW.

Thanks for reading!