Week 13 of Midterm

This week of Midterm I had to map out the controls for the Xbox 360. We were going to do for both Xbox and PlayStation but for the presentation were are just going to have a Xbox 360 controller instead of the key board. We also are going to have someone in the audience play our game for us instead of us playing it we think it would be really cool if someone plays it instead of us. So that's why we had to get the controls working. The controls are both very similar from Xbox to PlayStation the only difference being is that the D-pad is swapped with a analog stick. Something really cool that I learned about Xbox 360 controller compatibility is that it's so compatible with everything that even the military uses it to control there bomb defuse robots.

As you can see the Military does use Xbox 360 controllers to maneuver there Robots instead of a old computer joystick

Now I will talk about the reasons we choose our buttons over other buttons. Lets start with our movement and camera. We play a lot of game some old titles and some new one's also and what we came up with is that for a adventure game or any modern game your left thumb is usually the thumb you use to move with and your right is the one you use to look around. It has been like this since they came out with the PlayStation 2. It was made available for the first PlayStation but it wasn't there original controller. In the second generation the PlayStation 2 the console came with the same design with the addition of the two analog sticks on the bottom, at first the first couple of titles didn't require you to use the analogs it was not until later that the analog became a standard and most game even until this day give tutorials on how to use your thumbs to move and look around. So that is why we choose to use them as our movement and camera. The jump button dates back to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) where there was only two buttons in the controller it was usually jump and action.I am fairly certain everyone knows who Mario is the first game be came out in just had him jumping, walking, and climbing ladders and later in the classic platform game Super Mario Bros your jump button was located at the bottom of the controller so we decided to make our game like a classic platform and have the jump button at the bottom of the key's. Our attack button is not a conventional attack trigger it is more of the Super Nintendo platform years. There "Action" button was on the left button (Action button is the same thing as attack) Currently we have a special button that is located at the top, but in game it has no use as of right now, we choose this because it just felt right. We were holding the controller and decided that the special button should be in a place that your finger wont identically hit it so we went with what felt well and comfortable. Our "use" button is on the right side this originally was our "Dash" button but after we finalized the controls we saw that there was no "use" button and we had to change "Dash" to "use." This button was another example of us holding the controller and seeing what felt right no complicated history it just felt right. Our block button is another example of it feeling right. We also wanted to make the player has a sense of "Ok, my shield is on my left hand so I need to use my left hand to use it. " Next we wanted the player to be able to scroll through his inventory to choose different weapons or equipment that he gets and we wanted the player to be able to go left and right of his inventory, because there is nothing worse then cycling though your inventory and identically skipping the item you want and not being able to go back. These buttons are our Left bumper and Right bumper usually your index finger is placed over them while holding a controller. Our right trigger was intended for a roll that we wanted to implemented but it fell on our maybe pile because we noticed that it wouldn't have a big impact on the game. Finally our start button is our pause button. This is just a norm for ALL video games, any game that doesn't follow this just feels strange and you would agree if you just play two or three games.

As you can see there are a lot of similarities in both the Xbox and Playstation controller scheme. This is also why someone that plays Strictly Playstation can swap consols and need very little time to get use to the new control scheme