Woah! "Out of of control" No Kidding. I think this is a fantastic interpretation of the theme as, like you mentioned, taking something the player is used to having ,such as the knowledge of the button mapping in order to play the game, away from them is completely Out of Control.
The execution could use some improvement:
- The buttons are really small and very hard for me to read. Some of them even look the same so I had to press 2 to 3 different buttons that all looked to the same to find the right one
- The button combinations are way eradic and it can make the game frustrating to play in a not-good way
- There's great fun to be had keeping the player on edge by constantly changing their buttons but consider those who are not physically able to stretch their fingers or so drastically stretch their hand across their keyboard.
- My suggestions is to have a predetermine set of keys, that are always mapped to the same controls (i.e movement & jumping) and just switch between down at random
- e.g.
- Movement: A, D | Left, Right Arrows | 1, 2 | 9, 0 (and whatever other buttons that would be comfortable for a player to use)
- Jumping: W, S, SPACE, Up/Down Arrow, Mouse Click (etc.)
- Then you can randomly change the movement and/or jumping to one of those buttons
- Finally, give the player time to react to the change (fun games tend to lean towards favoring the player)
- This could be something like a flashing sign that lets me know "in the next few seconds the buttons are going to change.
- Take this further an maybe indicate which one (! Movement) OR (! Jumping) is going to change
- Once the buttons do change:
- Make them appear on screen for like a good 3-5 seconds
- Allow the player to still use the previous combination for another 1-2 seconds
- This is to allow the brain to register the buttons have change and the body to react
- This should help keep the flow of the game intact, after all this is a platformer and great platformer has "flow" allowing the player to transition from moving to jumping seemlessly.
- This could be something like a flashing sign that lets me know "in the next few seconds the buttons are going to change.
These are just my tips on how to improve the experience for future development should you choose to work on it post-jam.
Overall, a very good idea. The art is wonderful and the aesthetics mixed with the sounds/music all fits well together. :)