Life is a Work In Progress

And so is this Blog, I have recently begun some site maintenance and with the help of some Youtube tutorial videos, I have been attempting to provide a more polished look. Most notably I have added tabs so that it will be easier to navigate my posts by category. I have also decided to share more of the content I have created, including my newest video and some of my dear Game Concept design documents. Enjoy but please do not lift my ideas :)

Pumped Up Kicks Best Video

My Directorial debut

The subject matter is a little dark but... so are the lyrics

Innovate Fluid Controls and Conquer

Controls are an overlooked part of successful gameplay, and I would say that it is next to impossible to make a great game without a great control scheme. The first thing I do when playing any new game is to move around and see how it “feels”. Like driving a new car, one of the first things you notice is how a game handles, for me there is no greater turnoff than a game with sluggish or imprecise controls. If I cannot control the game properly why am I playing it? A few games come to mind when I think of great control schemes: Smash Bros Melee, Goldeneye 007, and Halo CE. In all of these games your character moves fast and actions are executed almost at the speed at which you can think of them. This makes for a truly gratifying experience, and at the best moments you feel completely immersed, with each feint and attack being performed instantly almost instinctually.

It is no surprise then that the top games, especially those in the FPS genre, tend to be the ones which utilize the most intuitive and elegant control schemes. When Halo CE was released, almost every subsequent FPS adopted a near identical control scheme. Now the dominant position is held by the COD franchise, and true to form its control scheme and notably the “Aim Down Sights” mechanic, is nearly universal amongst current shooters. This being said, the “Motion Controlled Shooter” genre has not taken off , even with the advent of advanced gaming apparatus like, Microsoft’s Kinect, or Sony’s Move. This is a genre that cannot gain steam because the dominant control scheme is by my description. Broken. Until a fluid and intuitive control scheme is introduced motion controlled shooters will retain their role as novelty games that lack in lasting appeal.

Motion controlled shooters suffer from what I would call “Deadzone Syndrome”. This means that the dominate control scheme utilized by almost every motion controlled shooter uses the mechanic of a “Deadzone Box”. Unfortunately, this scheme is neither intuitive nor elegant, it places too many demands on the player and penalizes him with unreliable results. Like early Nintendo 64 games, motion controlled shooters suffer from their inability to compromise between giving the player control of his directional movement (where the player is moving) and aiming orientation (where the player is facing). Early 64 games were unable to reconcile this issue, and suffered for it. The player only had one analog control stick, but there were two tasks, what were developers to do? They had to compromise, the first company to do it right was Rare with Goldeneye 007. What did they do? They divided the tasks equally into a manageable and inventive control scheme. The analog stick was used to control forward and backwards movement yet simultaneously govern horizontal aiming orientation, a novel idea indeed! Lateral movement was regulated to the left and right C buttons and vertical aiming orientation was mapped to the up and down C buttons. This intelligent division of labor coupled with fast movement speed and an extremely active “auto aim” system struck an almost perfect balance. Controls were fluid, aiming was simplistic, but maneuvering still required substantial skill. All was right In the world of FPS and every game hence forth utilized a strikingly similar control scheme.

But then a Revolution occurred. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo released their next generation consoles, and all of them had one thing in common. There were now TWO analog control sticks, no longer did movement and aiming orientation need to be carefully divided between multiple sets of buttons, No, now their was a control stick that solely governed movement while the other took care of aiming exclusively. It was a revelation and it allowed for a far more elegant and precise control scheme to emerge. Games like Halo and Call of Duty led the way and to this day hold a virtual monopoly on FPS controls. With this revelation came a double edged sword, while it allowed the FPS genre to grow by leaps and bounds, it also saw game developers forget the lessons learned from dealing with the limitations of a single analog stick. This lesson seemed unimportant, we would never have to deal with that problem again, we had two analog sticks now. Predictably, history repeated itself, and despite great advancements in technology the video game industry was faced with an old adversary with the advent of motion controlled gaming. The Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect, and Playstation Move hoped to revolutionize gaming with the ability to have players actual motion control the game. One hand would navigate an analog control stick while the other hand’s motion would control the aiming orientation. Unfortunately there was an unforeseen complication, the players motion hand now must control aiming orientation AND the actual location of the Aimer. This is a new task altogether, where previously the aimer would always remain static in the middle of the screen. If we have learned anything, we know that we must have either enough analog control sticks to govern each task, or we must be inventive and divide tasks appropriately. To the detriment of gamers everywhere, developers did neither. There is no logical way to add a third control analog as players only have two hands, and its introduction would no doubt add a layer of complexity that is both difficult and undesirable. No, instead their strategy was to regulate all movement to a single analog control stick, while the other hands movement controlled both aiming orientation and aimer location. To compensate for the difficulty encountered when one hand must simultaneously controll two tasks, developers introduced Deadzone mechanics, what I would dub the proverbial nail in the coffin for the motion controlled shooter genre. The Deadzone mechanic creates a box (the size of which is often customizable by the user). When the aimer is within the box, only aimer location is controllable, and when it is outside the box, only aiming orientation is controllable. While this simplifies the near impossible task of navigating both with one hand simultaneously, it is clunky in the extreme. The player thereby spends most of his concentration on switching between these tasks and often gets confused, especially when a target lies just on the periphery of the Deadzone. The player must then first reorient his aim and then move back to control aimer location, in the heat of the moment this is extremely frustrating and gives new meaning to the term Sluggish controls.

The wonder is that the lesson of the N64 was so soon forgotten and exchanged for such a poor alternative. But there is still hope, in order for a successful control scheme to be accomplished we must recognize that there is only one analog at our disposal, we must be inventive. THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IS REDACTED (I can’t give away all of my ideas :)