Hi gang! Today I’m going to talk about my motivations for making the game a one-button platformer. I’ve certainly been asked this question a few times and hopefully this devlog will give you a good insight as to why I’ve gone with this control scheme.
First things first; this has been the design goal for the game from the very beginning when I was first prototyping it and isn’t something that came about by accident. Although the game changed form somewhat during that prototyping phase, having only a single button input was always a core tenet of the game’s design.
Design Challenge
I kind of wanted to flex my design muscles a little with this project and work out how I could make a game that still had lots of fun platforming mechanics with just a single button. As I’ve hopefully demonstrated with previous blog entries, it turns out there’s a lot of gameplay to be had with this setup!
Each mechanic I designed had to work with this in mind. The vast majority of bubble powerups act as augments to Bubbles’ jump ability - whether it’s additional jump power, infinite vertical travel or switching dimensions. The hardest bubble powerup in this respect was the Launcher bubble - this is the one that lets you launch Bubbles at high speed in a specified direction.
Let's take a look at how this evolved over time:
Earliest designs for this actually had the Launcher make use of arrow keys / left stick, but I changed this because it felt so awkward having just one mechanic make use of directional input, especially one that appears relatively late in the game.
I then had this operate on a eight-directional carousel, which seemed to fix the problem - but if you missed a direction, the wait for the carousel to get back to where you wanted it to be would be interminable. Speeding it up to try and resolve the issue just meant it was easy to make input errors and go flying off in the wrong direction - very frustrating! How do you fix that?
Well, the solution turned out to be preserving the carousel system, slowing down the direction changes slightly, but only having them work in three directions. This didn’t actually change any of the gameplay I wanted to achieve from it such as using your momentum and re-entering a bubble to weave through hazards and it also simplified level design as I had much more control over where the player would likely go.
Accessibility
As a little bit of a preface/plug (hey, it’s relevant), I do a charity gaming marathon stream with some friends over the Easter holidays at GamingForOthers for the utterly brilliant SpecialEffect. Collaborating with them has been fantastic and I’ve learned a lot from them.
As a brief summary to the work SpecialEffect do, they are a charity that provides support for gamers with disabilities that prevent them from being able to use standard game controllers effectively - usually by creating bespoke controllers and setups that are tuned for each person’s needs.
However, SpecialEffect also work with the games industry to promote the inclusion of more accessibility options and controls as part of the game’s design. In addition to the single button controls, I have additional accessibility options in the form of Boosts that I’ll be covering in more detail in a future devlog.
This also has the upside of younger players or people who are normally intimidated by platform games being able to more easily enjoy the game! (For any hardcore players who might be worrying about the game being too easy, don’t worry - I very much have you covered too; that's also coming in a future devlog!).
I will be looking for Team Cats & Bears to support several SpecialEffect initiatives such as One Special Day and GameBlast.
Buttoned-Up
I wanted to make sure that the reaction I got from people playing the game was ‘Huh, I didn’t even realise I was missing extra buttons’. The one area I couldn’t really do with a single button was the menus - whilst I could technically have had something like a carousel that you stop with the input button, I think this would have been utterly nauseating to use in practice, so I did make an exception for that! Can you think of any ways to make a functioning UI with a diverse set of options and a single button only?
As ever, thank you for reading. If you enjoy these insights into the game’s development, please consider following and wishlisting the game to see more of them. You can also follow the game's development on Twitter, where I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game or game development in general.
Until next time!
Johnny
Team Cats & Bears