Build a Playtesting Mode

[fractalbach]

Why

The touchscreen controls are shit.💩 They are unintuitive, confusing, and sometimes unpredictable. 🤨📲❓ Currently, they can cause players to ragequit within 20-30 seconds.🤬

After experimenting with several different types of controls, there is no clear-cut solution. The only consensus is that "something's not quite right".

How to find better controls

The way forward appears to be constructing a way to compare and contrast different controls schemes.

When given a bad control scheme, it's challenging to identify the "way it should be". It seems to be easier to compare 2 different ones, and say "this feels better than that".👍👎

what's playtest mode?

Able to swap between multiple different control schemes, and compare then on different scales:

• Overall, which feels better?
• Which is easier to learn without thinking about it?
• Which is more fun to use?
• (Finding specific questions to ask is hard.)

For the🎈 Balloon Grab🎈 game, here are some of the control schemes to try. Can try different combinations and mix-and-match different parts together:

• ~Virtual fixed buttons for jump and/or grab~
• ~Virtual fixed joystick for movement or directional jumping~
• Swipe in the direction you want to jump.
• Tap in the direction you want to jump (relative to player)
• Tap left/right sides of the screen to jump in that direction (relative to screen itself, not player)
• Tap on the location you want to jump to.
• Tap anywhere to grab a balloon.
• (More combinations of buttons and tap/swipe anywhere)

[fractalbach]

Started a highscores server, see https://github.com/fractalbach/highscores

[fractalbach]

The issue has been essentially resolved after a lot of play-testing and tweaking. From this point on, there isn't really a need to make different versions of the game that use different controls, they can be tweaked incrementally.

Non-Touch Controls:

• arrowkeys work best with simple left/right/jump mechanics.
• game controllers haven't been fully tested, but so far seem to work nicely with the simple mechanics that the keyboard uses.

Touch Controls:

• works best by combining movement and jumping into 1 mechanic: a "directional jump".
• tap a location: player jumps towards that point.
• dragging could improved later for finely grained movement.