Happy 2022, everyone!
It’s been a while since our last update. Most of the team took their well-deserved holiday break so the development for Goblin Stone is a bit slower than usual last month. Now that we are all back refreshed and full of energy, we’re ready to work our way towards the Early Access release.
Before 2021 ended, we did a lot of big and small fixes and of course game optimization. Even with the increasing number of assets and features being implemented in the game, we managed to reduce the game’s build size to almost one-third the size of its previous builds. This is an impressive feat as this will allow us to do more performance improvements later and make the game run better, smoother!
Gamepad Support
Steam’s recent updates and improvements of input features easily increased the number of players who use gamepad controllers. In the past, we received a good number of inquiries from our community about gamepad controls as well as porting Goblin Stone to consoles. Implementing the gamepad controls is a good head start if we wanted to port the game to different platforms in the future. One way or another it’s killing two birds with one stone so we decided to step right into implementing gamepad support.
Gamepad support, however, presents an interesting challenge for us. Goblin Stone UI was originally designed with a mouse in mind and later in development was adjusted to include keyboard controls.
Implementing the gamepad support has required us to rethink the functionality of the game’s user interface to make sure that it does not exclude important features such as tooltips. Interface objects such as the buttons, texts, 3D objects, and such have been made selectable so a player using the gamepad can interact with the UI and have access to all the features that a player using a mouse interface has.
Selectable objects have been given highlights for easy navigation when using a gamepad.
Setting up the controls
For the most part, The basic controls for movements and interactions are already very straightforward for the gamepad. We assigned a dedicated “use” button to interact with world objects while on adventure mode, and other dedicated buttons for certain game features. For example, pressing the ‘Y’ button will let you access the inventory, the ‘left trigger’ button allows you to Sneak, ‘Left Bumper’ to access the Minimap, combat abilities can be selected with the directional pad, and so on.
The first iteration of the gamepad button assignment.
Navigating the tooltips, on the other hand, is especially tricky. Unlike selectable game elements, the way we went about tooltips is we require pressing a combination of buttons to access them. This may not be the ideal setup but it works, and we might go on and improve it further as we continue to work on the system.
Ability card tooltips
Moving forward
At the moment, we are simultaneously improving the gamepad and the keyboard support. Although players will not be able to customize the button assignments yet, they will be able to fully navigate the entire game with a keyboard or any gamepad controllers for Early Access.
The first iteration of the keypad button assignment.
There is a lot of learning and experimenting involved in developing the gamepad support. In particular, we are aiming for the user interaction to be a pleasant intuitive experience. So there might be some changes with the assignment of buttons and its overall functionality later on.
We would love to share more with you about the development of the gamepad support but in the meantime, we will save the rest of our progress for our next blog posts. Thank you so much for reading and look forward to our next game development updates of Goblin Stone.
