unit to perform that action. Players can also left-click on the unit to select it and then
immediately right-click in the game-world, causing the unit to do the most logical
action for the location the players clicked, whether it means moving to that point or
attacking the unit there. Furthermore,StarCraftalso allows players to access a unit’s
different actions through a hot key instead of clicking on the button. This has the pleas-
ant side effect of keeping the interface simple enough for novice players to handle,
since it is all point-and-click, while the expert players can spend their time memorizing
hot keys in order to improve their game. In many console action games, different but-
tons on the controller will perform the same action. A common choice to make,
particularly on PlayStation games, is to allow players to control character movement
through either the left directional pad or through the left analog control stick.Crash
Bandicoot, for instance, allows players to move with either the directional pad or the
analog stick, and also allows players to access Crash’s ability to slide by pressing either
a trigger button or one of the buttons on top of the controller. Providing multiple ways
for players to achieve a single game-world action helps to ensure that a given player will
enjoy using one of the ways you have provided.
There is a lot of room for creativity in game design, but control design is not one of
the best areas to exercise your creative urges. Your game should be creative in its
gameplay, story line, and other content, but not necessarily in its controls. Some of the
most successful games have taken control schemes that players were already familiar
with from other games and applied them to new and compelling content. Sometimes
the established control scheme may be weak, but often it is not weak enough to justify
striking out in an entirely new direction with your own control system. As a designer
you must weigh what is gained through a marginally superior control scheme with what
is lost because of player confusion. For example, Sid Meier’s fine RTS gameGettysburg!
included as its default method for ordering troops around a “click-and-drag” system
instead of the established “click-and-click” system found in other games. His system
was quite creative and actually may have been a better way of controlling the game than
the established paradigms. However, it was not so much better that it outweighed the
confusion players experienced when first attempting to play the game, a fact he admits
in the interview included in Chapter 2 of this book. Console games are particularly good
at providing uniform control schemes, with fans of games in a particular genre able to
pick up and immediately start playing almost any game available in the genre, even if
they have never seen it before.
During the course of the development of a game, as you are playing the game over
and over and over again, it is very easy to get accustomed to bad controls. Though the
controls may be poorly laid out or counterintuitive, as a game’s designer working on a
project for several years, you may have used the controls so much that they have
become second nature. However, as soon as others play the game for the first time,
they will quickly be frustrated by these controls and are likely to stop playing as a
result. Indeed, when I ranDrakan: The Ancients’ Gatesa few years after it shipped, I
was immediately stunned at how bizarre and disorienting the controls were, particu-
larly the ability to look left and right on the PS2’s right analog stick. Other members of
the team I showed it to were similarly shocked. “We shipped it like that?” they said
incredulously. Over the course of three years developing the game, we had grown
familiar with the game’s oddities and the controls seemed fantastic. With some distance
134 Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay