Interesting, what controls do you personally use? I find the mouse more intuitive to me. any feedback is awesome so I can add it to the game. thank you!
For a game like this, personally, I'd probably be looking at arrow keys for movement, and some combination of the lower left characters and/or spacebar for actions and jumps.
The fact that there are two different attacks, plus run, jump, and "minion" does make it a bit awkward to find a set of controls that handle everything cleanly, I'll admit.
Playing around with it a bit to try to get a feeling for what keys feel "intuitive" to me in this specific case, I kind of have a feeling for arrow keys move, left shift runs, Z jumps (which would make it easy to run and jump - although I notice that jumping doesn't maintain run velocity - that might be a bug). X and C would be the two attacks, although I'm not sure offhand which is which, X "feels" more like the projectile, but also feels like "primary attack", which you may not want to be the projectile since it costs health. "Minion"... I'm not entirely sure. It's the least used, doesn't really need to be reached quickly. Could be V, or F. Left Ctrl could be an option too. (I'd suggest D as being easy to reach from the ZXC position - but obviously that would break WASD as a movement option).
Alternatively, up arrow for jump rather Z in that control scheme could work as well - effectively all movement is on arrow keys, and all "actions" are on the left hand. That approach can also be flipped for people who use the other hand - WASD for movement and jumping, with something in the i, o, p, j, k, l, etc section of the keyboard being actions - although that way around is harder to squeeze in a run modifier.
But without being able to test some of these assumptions in context, they're just best guesses right now on what could work in this case.
Thanks for the comment and feedback! I think in order to make most of these key binds, it would just be better for me to add key binding options. that way players could customize the buttons. I am right handed so the WASD control scheme works for me better. this also makes the E, L-Shift, and Space bar easy to reach. I was limited on time since I joined late but I will add some more options in the future. thank you again for the feedback
Yeah, I get that - if you're right handed, and using the mouse, WASD is absolutely natural for movement - it's where the other hand naturally sits. But, the primary reason for that is actually because the mouse is natural to use with the dominant hand because he mouse is used for precision work, so you want the most control. But when you're not doing that, you've got options.
I'll reveal myself to be an old fogey here, and mention that a lot of video games on computers historically used the arrow keys for moving - even predecessors to today's 3D games (Doom and Wolfenstein 3D being two of the major titles I remember from when I was a kid) used the arrows to move. Part of that I imagine being intuition (with minimal video game history to pull from, arrow keys meaning "move" were probably more intuitive, and I'd guess the other part being that the majority of gamers would be then handling the most intricate controls with their dominant hand (mouse aim wasn't a thing - in fact "aim" wasn't a thing beyond left/right 🤣).
Now, there's decades of games that use WASD + mouse "look" for movement, so I expect that's why people find it natural to go for WASD, and then "mouse attack" just feels like the obvious pairing. But they're a different style of game. As someone who uses a laptop, grew up on games that didn't use a mouse, and spends too much time thinking about Human Computer Interaction (and never believed my HCI professor when he tried to evangelize the superiority of the mouse for ALL interactions), I tend to notice these things, and spend (obviously) too much time thinking about why they do or don't work.
That all being said, yeah, control customization is a pretty typical way to deal with "there's lots of controls, and no two people are the same".
For Sure! I grew up in the early 00s playing emulators on my dads old windows xp machines. controls for those were mostly the arrow keys for movement. I am a pretty big Zelda nerd and I started playing the first game really young. over time I moved to Wasd since more of the main stream games used that. Minecraft being one of the biggest reasons. lol I also I was playing a ton of BF 1942 .