Sometimes, I'm Wrong

Apr 19 2020

Last week we did a first draft of the ending cutscene using an idea I had to animate it simply. If you haven’t seen it, go beat the game real quick and give it a look - it’s.. bad. And not because of the art; the aesthetic just doesn’t match.

I should’ve listened to Sara when she told me a few still images would do the job better. We’re moving in that direction now.

This weekend’s update is all about mobile controls. When I first got this running on mobile, I thought the “edge of screen mouse pan” worked, but it was immediately obvious when anyone else tried it that it was unintuitive - you just want to click-and-drag to pan on a touchscreen. So that’s what we’re doing now, and it’s effectively an entirely different interface.

Implementing click-and-drag panning wasn’t super hard (fortunately my initial camera code was pretty easy to modularize); the harder part was making the rest of the game work with that input style. For example, if you happened to tap on something you could interact with, you immediately got a dialog, and you couldn’t pan - super disruptive when you accidentially tapped something when attempting to just look around. The fix for this ended up being that on mobile, things are interacted with on mouse up instead of mouse down, and we track if you were panning the screen before the mouse up to know if it should count or not. Fortunrately again, the interaction code was simple enough to allow a function call to replace the existing condition without much fuss (although more places than I remembered repeated that check).

With that sorted, interacting with items became weird; it was more natural to click-and-drag inventory items, especially when everything else worked on mouse up now. So again, mobile’s input scheme diverges - on mobile, you drag inventory items onto interactable entities instead of selecting them and then selecting the entity. I think this feels prety natural.

So, I was also wrong about mobile input, initially. But being wrong is okay, because it’s how we learn. I’ve been playing The Witenss lately, and it makes wrongness a mechanic in some ways - it presents you with a simple puzzle to teach you, but as the puzzles get harder, your assumptions get proven wrong, and in doing so you get closer to understanding. I was wrong about cutscenes, and I was wrong about mobile input, but in being wrong I learned how to do it better.

Did we waste a night of work? Maybe. Or maybe we spent that night learning how to make the game even better.