And ah, I love the topic of input delay, so excuse me for going on a bit of a rant:
Super Smash TV was actually the primary game I looked at to see how 4-way shooting could be implemented.
One issue I had with Smash TV was that when you shoot diagonally, so pressing say both X and A, the first bullet will either go straight up or to the right instead of going diagonal, since your thumb won’t press both buttons at exactly the same time. With Smash TV that’s ok because you can just rain lots of bullets one after the other.
For a versus game like Unarmed, I found out that doesn’t work so well, because if you saturate the level with bullets, players can’t react anymore, and the game won’t be fun.
So I figured I needed to limit the amount of bullets by rate limiting. But if you do that, you want every bullet to go the way the player intended to. For this I implemented a slight delay between the first time a press is registered and actually firing the bullet so that the other button can catch up before we decide on in what direction to shoot. I set this variable to 2 frames, but after looking at the code again, it turns out this mechanism adds 3 frames of lag. So 50 miliseconds. I just checked this in the debugger, which can step through individual frames, and I can confirm that it is indeed exactly 3 frames.
For comparison 50ms is generally within the accepted range of online lag for an FPS or fighting game. I can try to experiment with less, or even make it a configurable option. I’m probably less prone to notice the lag as my reaction times aren’t great to begin with. But I can believe that 3 frames might be noticeable.
Another reason for the lag could just be that you’re using an emulator. This bit me a couple of times, while developing the game, where it turned out my OS was introducing quite a bit of lag, or worse when my bluetooth headset was introducing a loooot of lag between game and game sound. Testing on HW made that go away. But I’m guessing you noticed that the lag wasn’t there when jumping for example.
As for button layout, I guess you mean ‘shoulder button to jump’ instead of ‘shoulder button to shoot’: yea I already abstracted the code to allow for different input methods. But there was just so much to improve and I had so little time to come up with an interface. I did do some play testing with some people, and I was a bit surprised myself that they didn’t seem to bothered by the mapping of jump to R. Even after I prodded them on it. So that also meant that the feature tumbled down a bit on the list of priorities. Although I wouldn’t have time regardless I think.
But your feedback has put it back on the map :) And yea, mapping to up might be a good solution.
I'm doing a 2 to 4 player vs platform shooter. I have a match loop working and a menu screen, and I'm now working on filling it up with background music, more than one sound effect, hopefully at least one additional visual effect, and a title screen. Oh and a title! Still haven't chosen a title..
Yes, I'd also love to know about this. I have some ideas about users being able to do customisations and I'd like them to be able to save this. I don't see the harm in allowing for this if it makes the user experience nicer. It would make my main idea a lot more fun I think.
Yes, thismushroom decision was kind of borne by necessity. I didn't have too much time to work on this but still wanted to present the player with a somewhat complete story. So I put it on rails.
Yea, mostly because of development time constraints I wanted to make the player feel trapped in an eternal loop without hope of escape, like Covid under lockdown makes you feel.
I did purposefully put the EXIT sign next to the front door, so the player feels that's the goal. What I didn't think about is that game players foremost are primed to solve puzzles. I hoped that people would just get that they're stuck in a loop, but people expect there to be a solution, so it's probably too much of a frustrating experience in the end.
Ha, I didn't think of the fridge actually being broken. I really like that idea. That is official lore now!
