Add genre analysis of control schemes to design book

[TimJentzsch]

The control scheme is a very important factor for the user experience and should be taken into consideration when designing features. It's often challenging for complex games like factory builders and RTS games, as they have many actions to execute which should have shortcuts available.

I think it makes sense to look at both factory builders and RTS games to take inspiration. The schemes could be divided into "character-based control schemes", where the player is controlling a main character (usually with an inventory system), e.g. Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program and "god-mode-based control schemes" where there is no player character, e.g. Age of Empires 4, Settlers 3, etc.

We should look at both mouse & keyboard based controls as well as controller controls. Stellar controller support could be a nice selling feature for our game, as it is usually an afterthought for this genre and not a great experience. With the Steam Deck, controller support for PC games has become even more important.

[alice-i-cecile]

Agreed, I think this is a great lens to look at a critical problem.

[alice-i-cecile]

Camera movement in traditional RTS

• relies strongly on "jumping-to-an-interesting-event" (e.g. production complete, enemy contact, etc.) event

• pan-when-cursor-at-edge exists, but is a "noob trap" (slow)

• click on minimap to jump to location

How mouse + camera interaction works in Civ 6 (thanks @wallamide)

• Civ has WASD pan, arrow keys pan, mouse click/drag, mouse panning from moving to the edge, and lets you do temp rotation of the camera, which resets when you do stuff (not a fan of that last bit)
• "a unit needs orders" context button to jump to where a unit is, and a way to click through/select from a list a city/unit to go to it on the map
• the "something happened over here" click to look at the location of something
• minimap click/drag to move the main camera

How mouse interaction works in Civ 6 (thanks @wallamide)

• hover over a unit or an icon for a specific resource - get name of thing or owner/what it is
• hover over a land tile generally, get full info about the tile (owner/city, tile biome, impacts on unit movement, appeal info, continent, and what you get if the tile is worked)
• so you're prompted to slowly move the mouse to see stuff/click on stuff (via context menus and need for land knowledge during play) or you are prompted to move the camera using the mouse (via regular gameplay)
• also only units/cities offer you anything when you click them, so clicking a random tile and panning the mouse doesnt impact anything besides the camera really
• ui is all context dependent, so holding down on a city name/tile and moving the mouse means the camera moves while only a fast click activates the city menu
• it seems like there's a time buffer for mouse input that lets the ui know what to do
• however hover menus/gui are all dependent only on if your mouse is hovering for more than like 300-500ms
• city menus appear to be dependent on if the mouse is actively on the screen space where the city label is when you let go of the click.
• clicking on the city menu, then moving the mouse off the label and letting go doesnt open the menu. but, having the cursor on any part of the label, even if the cursor is in motion, and letting go of LMB consistently results in opening the menu

Factorio: camera controls

• camera is centered on player avatar, whose position is controlled via WASD
• creative mode offers other options (such as pan-at-edge?)

[bzm3r]

Some reasons to prefer drag-to-pan over pan-when-cursor-at-screen-edge:

1) slow UX: in many RTS games where it is a control option, it ends up being a "noob-trap" compared to learning hotkeys to jump to important/recent events

2) UI unintentional side-effects (which can be annoying): if you are trying to interact with something close to the edge of your screen, you might instead trigger panning. Or, if you are in windowed mode, you might scroll to an edge that might trigger some sort of task-bar.

Note that Factorio does not have drag-to-pan or pan-at-edge. It has keyboard pan (WASD) through the concept of the player avatar.

3) In contrast drag-to-pan is intentional. While there might be some issues around clicking on things you don't mean to interact with, these can be designed out of by adding further modifiers to click-to-drag, rather than having it only be a LMB click to drag, make it a CTRL + LMB click to drag.

But note that one could (arguably profitably) choose to stick to keyboard-to-pan and not include drag-to-pan at all. However, users might expect drag-to-pan functionality to exist because it is something intuitive based on what they might have learned from other programs.

[TimJentzsch]

• WASD is often not an option when the keybindings are needed for other shortcuts.
• Edge-pan is the standard in some game types (such as MOBAs), but it should have a camera speed setting.
• I think it's a good idea to have at least two options for camera movement as the preference can vary from player to player. Especially stuff like middle-mouse drag pan is basically "free" to add, as it doesn't really conflict with any other controls.

[alice-i-cecile]

Closing, as I don't think that this analysis is a useful enough use of time at this stage :)