How I Fixed Movement in Adrift by Changing the Character Sprite
That’s it. That’s the change. Read on to see why this worked.
What do you do when everyone tells you that your game is something it's not?
I've been playtesting Adrift, my latest game project, for several months. As soon as folks would pick up the controller they would say out loud, "Oh, this is a twin-stick shooter" or, "Oh, this is a racing game." It's not. Adrift is a game where you fight physics to maneuver ship capsules into place. I'm trying to create something new and different here. It's been frustrating to hear folks project other genres on Adrift before they even press a button.
Adrift is a game where you fight physics to maneuver ship capsules into place.
I've been struggling with this problem since I started playtesting Adrift several months ago. When someone new picked up the controller they would struggle to feel in control of their space ship. Early on I was guiding people through sandbox playtests. I explained the controls and guided them forward. After a little back and forth they would start to get it and have a great time. But I can't sit with every player and teach them how to play. More recently I have been working on a tutorial scene. That means introducing mechanics one by one, creating a visual language that draws attention to points of interest, and figuring out why the heck folks can't understand the movement controls.
So, how do I fix this game so that players feel in control of their ship?
My first action was to give players the ability to remap controls. If players don't feel in control, maybe just changing buttons or tweaking how the buttons work will solve the movement issue? I added a quick options screen based on player feedback and brought it to the next playtest. I added controls remapping and the ability to set movement relative to world space or the player's ship direction.
Options Screen
At the next playtest I waited for players to complain and then showed them the options screen. They would tweak the settings, but I could tell they still did not feel in control by watching them play. One playtester even went full circle changing all of the settings and then finding their way back to the default controls as the most comfortable.
So it's not the mapping that is causing the disconnect. What else could it be?
Next I considered if I was making the wrong type of game. Should I be making a twin stick shooter? Should I be making a game where the controls are similar to Asteroids? I implemented controls in these styles and gave it a try. Certainly these are great control schemes...for certain types of games. For a game where fighting physics is the moment-to-moment gameplay they didn't feel right. Different control schemes made the physics feel more punishing. To combat that I would have to back off of physics as a mechanic and lean more into twin-stick shooter or racing genre mechanics.
But I don't want that. I want to make something new. Changing the movement style to conform to an existing genre is not the path I wanted to follow.
At this point I returned to my notes on playtests, and I looked at Adrift HARD. It's tough to look at a game I have worked on with the eyes of a new player. I'm too close to it. I get used to the rough edges or slightly imperfect mechanics. A huge value of playtesting is to see the game through someone else's eyes. What do those eyes see?
I took a screenshot of the first thing a player sees. This is it. This is all the information they have when they start playing. How are they projecting a genre before they even press a button?
The first thing a player sees.
There's not much here! The art is placeholder. There's walls and the ship and some glyphs that tell the player how to move.
I took a good look at the ship. It's a callback to another game I made, Gun Rocket, but tweaked to look like a person in an escape pod. The player avatar from Gun Rocket is, in turn, inspired by Asteroids. It’s basically just a triangle. It’s a ship body with wings. Is that it? Could it be as easy as removing the wings? For inspiration I looked at silhouettes of sci-fi ships.
So many of these ships look sleek and fast. That's not right for Adrift. I found my way to a couple of ships that felt less sleek and fast. One was the Millennium Falcon. It's basic shape is a circle with some bits jutting out. It's also thematically appropriate since it started its life as a freight pusher. I modified the ship sprite in Adrift to match these shapes...but again it didn't feel right. Next I took inspiration from Serenity and Battlestar Galactica. These ships are roughly hexagon shaped similar to the Adrift ship, and they have their engines mid-body rather than in the rear. With that inspiration I added some bumper/engines to the sides of the Adrift body and...hey! That feels pretty good to me!
Yep that’s it. That’s the change.
But what feels good to me doesn't matter. The truth of this game is in playtesting it.
Yesterday I went to SLICE and 4/4 playtesters picked up a controller and just played. They had zero hesitation, and zero trouble with movement controls. It was a meandering journey with several dead-end hypotheses, but in the end all I needed to do was tweak the character sprite.
Wishlist Adrift on Steam and join the open pre-alpha playtest to see it evolve in real time!
Thank you for reading!
