Menuing, Controls Settings (Patreon)

Here's what I've been working on, lately: Settings menus. Very unexciting to show off and surprisingly frustrating to implement... but, unfortunately, very important.

I'm sure it's because of my lack of in-depth knowledge of Unity's UI event system and the finer details of using their new input system for local multiplayer, but the whole process has been extremely slow and frustrating. Plenty of edge cases, workarounds, and overall just a bit messy....

(A lot of my pain comes from the fact that the game can be played in split screen mode: Each player gets their own pause menu, separate controls settings, etc. – it makes managing things and handling inputs a lot more complicated.)

About Controls Settings

The main reason I'm focusing on settings and menuing, right now, is because it was/is a bit of a risk factor: Not in a "the project may fail" sort of way, but more in a "I need to figure this out, rather sooner than later" sort of way.

Controls settings, especially, are also a matter of accessibility, so it's definitely an important thing to get right.

Realistically, I could do the same thing many indie games do and just... not care? "To play this game you need an Xbox/PlayStation controller; and if my default button mapping doesn't work for you: Tough luck!" would probably still work for most players.

But of course I want to make an effort to try and make the game playable to as many folks as possible, whenever I can, so here we are!

Support for Generic USB Controllers

Until now, you could play the game with keyboard & mouse, as well as any "standard" game controller: That is, any controller that behaves like an Xbox or PlayStation controller.

With the new controls settings, as well as some more sensible defaults, pretty much any USB controller should do!

On the left, Xbox button mapping hints. On the right, the same hints for a Generic USB Controller: How helpful they are going to be depends on whether or not the controller actually has labels with the corresponding numbers, heh.

Which isn't to say that every random controller will give the optimal gaming experience, of course. Having a second analog stick to control the camera is pretty important, for instance, but neither of the two generic USB controllers I've tested could help with that—even the one  that actually has two sticks.

It technically works: Playing the game with a USB N64 controller. I don't recommend it, but I can't stop you, either.

But, still, it's nice to give people options and hopefully allow them to play the game with whatever hardware they have available.

UI, HUD, etc.

Here's another future topic: UI styling! As you can see in the video, the menus are still very plain and placeholder-y. That's something I still have to tackle, in the future, but nothing I have to hurry with.

Generally, there's still a lot of work that has to go into the UI and HUD.... Ultimately, I will keep it simple, so I can focus on gameplay and such, instead, but it's still something that needs to be done.

Thanks for your Support!

(And hopefully I can work on more interesting things again, soon.)