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(5 edits) (+3)

Exactly my sort of game, except the controls are just very unintuitive to me. Can I suggest an alternative?

  • X+left/right swaps what block you're holding.
  • X+up/down stores what's in your hand or takes it back out.
  • Tapping X rotates.
  • Circle (Z) places or picks up a block. Placing a block automatically takes out a new one.

(Circle is usually taken as "accept" or "main action" in Pico-8, isn't it? I would suggest at least swapping which is which.)

Part of the idea of this is that there is rarely a case where I want to open storage but not take something out or put something in.

I actually tried a very similar setup with having tapping X to rotate, but it ended up causing way too many accidental rotations. Plus with this version, it would cause the inventory to flicker open every rotation. I also don’t exactly like the idea of one directional cycling of options (in this case the tile’s rotation). If a desired rotation is missed, the tile has to be rotated 3 more times, potentially to be missed again. I could try to add a better indicator for if a tile is taken out or not and if it’s ready to be rotated.

As for swapping the X and Z buttons for the accept action, I mostly did this because it originally felt better for the keyboard and that I thought the playstation controller had the cross/X button as the accept button (just tested it, turns out it’s both the cross/X and circle buttons are the same, and on an xbox controller it’s backwards currently). I’ll either switch the buttons for the menus or have them both activate in the menus in the next update, though I don’t see it as urgent enough change right now.

(+1)

i agree, having a really hard time getting the hang of them. I think cycling through them would be much better than the pop up inventory