Post by Malkavian Grin in Zordak comments

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Thanks for the quick reply!

Firstly, its got lots of potential, I can see that, but I think a lot of my technical issues were getting in the way of it. Great job on the demo so far! Didn't want to seem like I was just trolling you or making it seem like you didn't know what you were doing.

Music: Not a problem. I understand its a demo and that music probably isn't a priority at this point. Tweaking mechanics and smoothing out bugs is, and that's probably a good thing. Just saying that a Metroidvania style game has to have great music. :)

Font: No, its not totally unreadable, but my eyes aren't what they used to be. A more standard font / just making the font take up more physical spacing per letter would be a great addition for some of us older gamers.

Controls: When I first booted the game up, it was in "custom" control scheme. I used those keys to map to JoyToKey initially. However, in mapping these keys I encountered some strange things. For clarification the game auto-recognized my SNES controller as "SNES controller" though I have no idea what this ended up doing to the control scheme.

So #1 this auto-detection would happen every single time I swapped windows (I.E. to go back and forth to see what button I needed to map next). This may have been messing with my controls every time it happened?

#2 I then swapped from Custom to Predefined 4. Then I started to experience the next issue, where it kept switching back to Custom.

#3 After I finally got all the keys mapped to Predefined 4, I started actually playing through the game. This was where I noticed that only one of my directional aiming buttons worked (one of the shoulder buttons). The other would simply point straight up. SUGGESTION: perhaps make it so there's instead a button that stops you from moving so that you can use the d-pad/arrow keys to aim?

#4 I'll give the "controller enabled" option a go and see if it fixes some issues.

Graphics: Yeah, my potato of a laptop seemed to not like shaders and I had to turn them off. Any graphical things are my issue for playing on this old hunk of junk LOL. I am playing on Windows 7 BTW.

Apapappa4 years ago

Okay, this helped me better understand the control config issue.

So what I think is happening is:

You are pressing buttons on the controller, which in turn activates the input in game, but then JoyToKey converts that input to a keyboard input, which in turn also activates in game causing a sort of loop and therefore switching control scheme between controller and keyboard since they are separate.

That's the only explanation I have for it switching control schemes by itself without your input.

So the solution(s) would be:

1. Since the game detects the controller then just use the controller without JoyToKey and bind everything in game, this is of course if the game actually understands the SNES controller, I have no idea about that.

2. Disable controller detection completely with the mentioned "controller enabled" option, this should make it so the controller does nothing to the game and all inputs should be keyboard only, which in turn *SHOULD* make JoyToKey work.

I think I will add a message in the controls menu recommending people to disable controller detection if they are planning to use JoyToKey.

About the suggestion, if I'm not misunderstanding then that option basically already exists, but without the "stop moving" part, since there are dedicated buttons for aiming and not just using the directional keys.

Sure, music is pretty important but exactly as you said, it's not really a priority right now, the priority is actually finishing the game and fixing the most glaring bugs.

Yeah, that's what I thought, the font couldn't be THAT bad. ;) but as mentioned before, hopefully I will fix this issue when I add support for using a more standard font, not sure when this is coming though.

As for the graphics, my suggestion would be:

If the shaders are not auto disabled eg: shows a message that they are "not compiled" and the button does not accept input, then:

Try using the "Low" or "Medium" graphics preset with the "Frame Skip" option turned on in the "Display" options.

This might allow you to play the game with some graphical things turned on.

Also, to be honest here, I haven't really tested the game on Windows 7, but it should work the same as on Windows 10, all I know is there are definitely issues running it on Windows XP that's why I put Win 7 as Minimum Requirements. :)

Anyway, thanks for the extensive reply since it (hopefully) helped me find the cause of the control issues.

Also, it did not really seem like you were trolling me or whatever, you said what was wrong and that is what I expect from feedback. :)

(sorry again for the "wall of text" reply)

itch.io

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