What makes good play control "feel right"?

[MrPopo]

I generally don't have that problem in the fixed perspective games because I find it easy to keep my bearings in those situations.

[marurun]

Well, I can think of a few platformer-based examples right off the top of my head.

Finally got around to playing Superfrog HD in Steam. Not a great game. Why? Well, for one, your character moves too immediately in response to input at too great a speed. Movement is not gradual at all, and acceleration is almost instantaneous. I tap in a direction and immediately I'm in trouble because there's no transition between standing still and RUNNING! Great way to fall off cliffs and run into enemies that are right next to you.

Look at the Mario 2D games. When you start moving, you start out slowly for just a moment, and then you speed up quickly to your maximum movement speed. You aren't in trouble the minute you tap a direction. You have a split second to adjust to the change in momentum.

Then there's platform detection. In Superfrog, the edges of platforms feel too close. You move out to the edge of the platform to make a tricky jump and... whoops, you fell off, right when you were sure you had a little extra space.

Look again at Mario, and many other NES platformers. You could edge out off the side of a platform quite a bit. It allowed players to be bold with jumps, and platformers often required that boldness. Sure, it's not realistic to have only one foot on the edge of the platform and still be just fine, but neither is stomping Goombas and being a super frog. Many character sprites have running animations that have their feet moving around across the entire width of the character sprite, and the game design has to be forgiving as a result.

That last bit plays into another game I want to love but can't: Shape Shifter on the TurboGrafx-CD. It's a fantasy platformer a little like Faxanadu on the NES. You progress through various areas to get items and money, but also have to backtrack a little. The edges of platforms are dangerous. Once one foot edges off the platform you fall. This is annoying, but rarely deadly until you get the ability to transform into a jungle cat. The jungle cat has a very wide, low sprite, and, again, once your feet begin to edge off the platform, you fall. But as this wide cat sprite, you pretty much can only safely stand square in the middle of the smaller platforms. Not only that, but many levels have platforms placed such that once you fall off one platform, you'll touch the one below and pause as you touch down, but then fall off that because your sprite is offset and not all feet are on it. There are these little cascade failures where you fall off a platform at the top of the screen and just slowly bounce down the screen repeatedly falling off the edge of each platform in your path, until you lose a life by landing in a pit.

Camera issues are another thing that plague play control, even in 2D games. Many 2D games pan the playing field ahead a little when you are moving forward. In Superfrog the camera whips around quite rapidly, probably to keep up with the twitchy movement controls. But you can be moving forward and then quickly hold the other direction and the camera suddenly zips back to show more of the space you just moved through. It's a little dizzying. Every directional or movement change results in a rapid and not at all subtle viewpoint adjustment.

Games that do this well slowly adjust the viewing area, and/or only after a character is moving at a certain speed.

I'll save enemy hitbox placement and hit detection for another post : )

[Blu]

I generally don't have that problem in the fixed perspective games because I find it easy to keep my bearings in those situations.

I think you might be alone in that sentiment; or you could just be a veteran of survival horror games that use tank control schemes. I'd be curious what other people who have played a lot of games using tank controls would say.

Though I like that the screen changes, I'm with BMF that there's been plenty of times where I fumble and make a slip. I think once you condition yourself a while, it tends to work out okay. But the controls for me are always cumbersome, because the way I control a character through an environment they don't control like other games that I play more frequently. It'd be like inverting thumbsticks on a shooter to me, or trying to speak another language.

[Snatch1414]

For me #1 is how responsive the on screen action is to your button press. As someone mentioned this can also be a case of the character not moving too SOON as opposed to too late. Input lag can be a problem but it can also be the animation. The response time is right but some other person or department decided the jump mechanic would look cooler with a couple more frames of animation, and it all goes to hell.

My other big thing is the layout has to make sense. Whatever that means is their job to figure out, but simply finding enough buttons to do everything does not equal good control. The Devil May Cry reboot was like that. L1+Square for the grappling hook, L2+Triangle for the axe, L1+Circle for the hammer. Just shoehorning everything into random combinations isn't the answer.

[J T]

I'm enjoying reading people's responses so far and it's making me realize that play control is deeply tied up with animation and level design. As Snatch1414 just said, if you put in too many frames of animation, it can mess up the feel of an action like a jump. As more games push for realism in graphics, this also means a push for realism in animated motion. With more frames of animation to churn through, you can lose that "it" factor for good play control.

I think this is particularly true in platformers where I generally prefer less realistic graphics and animation. I guess this has been apparent since the original Prince of Persia, which used rotoscoped animation to create some of the earliest fluid movement animations. Though it was vaguely a platformer, it never felt anything like a Super Mario Bros clone as it was far to slow and clunky. However, it still managed to be a good game because it had completely different level design and goals that suited the slower play control that didn't demand the same speed and agility of a Super Mario Bros style platformer. The somewhat frustrating controls were part of the gameplay. Similarly, I find some of the complaints about the "tank controls" of Resident Evil to be controversial because they also added a feeling of helplessness that some would say is fundamental to what made the game feel scary.

In this regard, I think I am mostly in agreement with the first half of Cronozilla's post or Dsh's point about "the relationship between aesthetic or emotional experiences and tactile movement". I think there is a holistic characteristic to the gameplay that certain kinds of movement feel good in certain contexts of animation and level design. While input lag, hit detection, and the subtleties of the programming for controlling the character are all essential to good play control, these things only take on value within a game world designed to compliment those controls.

[Erik_Twice]

One of the things that haven't been mentioned so far is the perceived weight of the character. Too often characters seem to accelerate and deaccelerate at an unnatural speed, as if they were weightless. A lack of inertia makes characters more difficult to control because even a brief button press makes the character move a lot on the screen, which leads to overcompensation.

For example, one of the most common situations a player will find himself is running towards the rightmost end of a platform, hitting left to stop himself from falling and then having to overcompensate for the new input because it actually moved the character left instead of just slowing him down.

But there are like a dozen pitfalls that are found over and over in platforming games:

- Screen centred at the character's height and not the ground (Earthworm Jim, R.O.B.)
- Camera doesn't change with the direction of movement (All of the games in this list)
- Overanimation (Earthworm Jim, Prince of Persia)
- Impossibility of making a single step (VVVVV, any game that uses Analog controls)
- Horizontal jumps (The Lion King): Often leads to hitting edges of platforms and being forced to put platforms too close too each other which isn't as fun.
- Too much height in jumps (Superfrog)
- Hovering from platform to platform (Rayman 2), grabbing ledges to climb platforms: This is a clutch to compensate for platforms that are too far away from each other.
- Cylinder-shaped levels in 3D
- Weightlessness
- Jab attacks in which the hitbox is too similar in size to the enemy's own hitbox
- Wide platforms
- Platform height too high, requires hitting the apex of the jump first and then moving laterally instead of doing both at the same time.
- No invencibility frames after being hit.

This might also be controversial but I'm totally on board with those that say that Western games tend to be awful at this, just like Euroshmups tend to be terribly bad.

Sensitivity is especially noticeable in first person games, and high level players in any FPS will generally play on a much higher sensitivity-level.

In my experience, most high level players use a very low sensitivity to be more precise, but there's an important minority that plays at a very high sensitivity. I belong to the later group, I can turn around 3-4 times on each direction before running out of mousepad and most people think it's crazy.

It depends a lot on your playstyle. People who tend to "track" the enemy are better off playing with a low sensitivity and people who "snap" at enemies are better off with a high one. In my opinion, of course, this is very subjective

[J T]

In dance, there is a way of notating movement called Laban Movement Analysis. It looks at movement based on 4 primary continuums:

Space: Direct / Indirect
Weight: Strong / Light
Time: Sudden (or Quick) / Sustained
Flow: Bound / Free



I think these can be useful dimensions for considering play control as well, but they don't capture everything.

[Blu]

This is really interesting, and we haven't even hit other genres. I'd be curious when sports games feel right in their controls, or racing games for that matter. I don't really have much perspective on the former, but I do like racing games that offer a decent balance between weight, which Erik mentions, and speed. Cars that have a particular heft behind them, do they brake faster than a car that is a little bit lighter. Can you feel the difference for cornering in a rear-wheel drive car that is programs versus front-wheel/all-wheel drive?

That and steering wheel controllers, do they emulate the racing experience well as a means of input, or are these racing controllers vastly built for a specific game in mind?

Not a tangent, I promise, but I think there's multiple paths we could venture down. I particularly do like when a game is somewhat forgiving; say a platformer allows a character to grab on a ledge if the timing of a jump wasn't perfect. That helps with the immersion factor, Zelda, Assassin's Creed, and a several others do this very well.

[J T]

The Mech genre is another good topic for play control debate. Many prefer their mechs of the slow weighty variety, like MechWarrior 2. I can see the appeal in the authenticity and tangible girth of these older steam punk mechs, but I still prefer the hyper agile robot ballet of games like Zone of the Enders. I thought Hawken was a good balance of heavy metal weight with agility, but I know others disagree.

[Exhuminator]

These days good play control to me revolves around "context sensitivity". I hate that so many developers think they have to use every button on the controller just because it's there. The A button can shoot the gun, open the door, acknowledge the dialogue, perform a melee attack, climb the ladder, cling to the wall, etc. all based on proximity and situational awareness of the in-game avatar.