It’s been too long since I posted. I have had a lot of stuff going on. Work is really busy because I’m working with a variety of unfamiliar technologies that require a lot of new learning. Home is really busy because we have two kids, a baby and I’m always coding something up when I actually have spare time! I have a lot more to post about mono and Android development but I wanted to take a little side trip to talk about something really important in game development: user input.

I recently purchased the PC version of Fable 3 on Steam because it was on sale and I enjoyed Fable 2 somewhat. Fable 3 is a great game. The art is spectacular, the animation fluid and lifelike, the quests and world are richly realized and the overall package (so far) is really solid. But I almost quit playing it right after I started because something about the movement was bugging the heck out of me.

I couldn’t figure out what it was. It seemed…sluggish. And choppy. I have a powerful desktop but I thought it was struggling with the game so I turned the graphics way down. Didn’t help. I suffered through it for awhile but it really took all of the fun out of the game.

Then, while poking around in the settings, I noticed a “mouse-smoothing” setting. Turning that down and turning the sensitivity up vastly reduced the sluggish response that I got from the input. But, it still didn’t fix it. I could focus on the game more but it still felt awkward, like my character was moving in deep mud.

Finally, I decided to give it a shot with my wired xbox controller.

WORLD OF DIFFERENCE.

Fable 3 was built for an Xbox controller. That’s all there is to it. You can play the game with a keyboard and mouse but it’s honestly a terrible input system. The laggy feeling had nothing to do with my PC. I now have the graphics set on max and it’s smooth as butter as long as I’m playing with a controller.

It really stood out to me that I simply couldn’t stick with even a “triple A” title like Fable 3 when the input sucked. It’s a good lesson for us indies because we usually aren’t making titles as beautiful and deep as Fable. That means that input is one of the most critical aspects of indie game design. It has to be perfect.

A shining example of flawless, responsive input is Super Meat Boy. If that game had a less effective input system it would have been just another indie platformer.

I think this is something that is really terrible with the WP7 Whirlygig and something I really want to fix (but I haven’t figured out how just yet).

 

Just that for now.