We are pleased to announce controller support is finally here! :)
We apologise for the delays to get to this point. It took as a while to get to this point mainly because there are so many different interactions and interface elements in the game now - it has been in development for 4+ years after all!
🎮 Controller support
As with most games, we decided to base our support around the Xbox-style controller, however, the main work of this update has been to support interactions and interfaces through controllers in general - this means you should be able to play with most types of controllers as long as you correctly map your keys (for example, through Steam’s big picture mode). With the big picture mode, we were also able to play and test the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch joystick controller.
There are a couple of additional things we’ve added for when you have your controller plugged-in:
- As you traverse the interface, we’ve added useful button hints in places to allow you to quickly see what you need to press to say, scroll to the next page or rotate a building.
- With the controller, you’ll be able to use a new interaction: your left and right triggers can quickly switch between different menus (eg left trigger to jump straight your last selected item in the book from the inventory)
❓ Interaction indicators
Probably the second most requested quality of life feature has been interaction indicators so that you can see what you are about to interact with. Due to the new controls, we thought this would be as good as time as any to finally add them in.
↗️ Tutorials
The tutorial system required an overhaul since there are now two control schemes, and we wanted to make sure the correctly fitted hints show up for each. At the same time, due the new interaction indicators, many were outdated and removed.
Another issue that existed with the old system was that if you re-bound certain keys, it would still show the old keys in the hints. That is no longer the case with the new system, and if you update your keyboard bindings you should see them correctly reflected in certain hints too. The mouse bindings will still be prioritised though since they serve as the primary interaction methods versus the secondary keyboard keys.
While we were here, we also gave the hints a much needed touch-up and now each unrolls in a cute little scroll :)
🐞 Bug fixes & Improvements
- Added a screenshot mode which you can toggle by pressing the F1 key or SELECT on your controller. This will hide your toolbar and any indicators. Since interaction indicators are now omni-present, we though this would be a good time to add this to help with cleaner screenshots :)
- Fixed bronze and salmon pie not being unlockable
- Fixed starting a new game sometimes getting stuck on the loading screen
- Remember the last tailoring cut and colour when switching between different clothing
- Updated the look of setting sliders to be consistent
- ESCAPE now firstly cancels any building and decoration placement
- ESCAPE now returns to the Townsfolk view first from the double-paged view
- Fixed dropping items in storage container not refreshing that list of items
- Fixed camera mode not being correctly set as controller when loading the game for the first time with a controller plugged in