Random game dev tip! I know it's extremely specific, but it took me two games to fully internalize it.
If in 2D, player aims with a thumbstick, hide the aiming line completely when they center the stick.
Otherwise, many players will not realize they can adjust their aim with the thumbstick without re-centering it every time. They'll frustratedly keep flinging and flinging the stick until aim line points perfectly.
Yes, I promise this is very common. I've done tons of playtesting to solve this
@Nifflas Oh my gosh… this is so obvious now that you said it. I’ve been trying to think of a way to get people to realize this for my last few play testing sessions for @vexpanse. People tap the stick, and think it’s super sensitive when it’s actually absolute.
@Nifflas Could you show like a gif of this in action? I can't seem to visualize the problem in my head. Are you talking about like aiming with the right stick in like a twin stick shooter? Sounds like an interesting problem I haven't thought about so I'm very curious haha
@Nifflas Ahh interesting, so players were like tapping it in a direction to aim rather than like holding the analog stick out and rotating it to aim? And this was caused by the players not realizing they SHOULD hold it so by making the aim line go away when they stop holding it hints to them that they should be holding in that direction?
@snowdrama Yeah! Actually, many would hold it out, but if they wanted to adjust the angle only a little, they'd re-center the thumbstick again. I guess they associated the motion of pulling the thumbstick towards a direction to aiming, not the thumbstick facing that angle.
@snowdrama I don't know exactly why because the following will sound contradictory, but retracting the aim line while not holding the stick in a direction still helped the players that made that mistake too figuring out how to aim.
Affordable Space Adventures was my first game where I encountered this issue. In that game, however, it wasn't possible to hide the aim line because how it also acts as a flashlight. We needed a different solution to teach players it.
Which is why early game, the flashlight breaks and starts dangling unless you hold it in place with the stick.
Luckily, this fit the narrative perfectly that the space ship is heavily damaged from the start and being repaired as you play.
@Nifflas ASA is like Kinect Party on the Xbox 360 - the best use of the peripheral for that console and the only reason I keep those respective consoles
@Nifflas I made a version of coyote time in the musical shooter VR game "audica" that I was proud of, which I dubbed "temporal aim assist": whenever the player pulled the trigger, it would pick the best-scoring aim that the player had achieved over the last several frames (100ms-ish), and shoot from that location. I found that VR controllers are so light that people seem to jerk their aim while pulling the trigger, and this resolved that. cheating in the player's favor made the game feel so much better, both for new and experienced players.
@awwbees Oooh, that's neat! That's the same as what Ynglet does, it checks a few past trajectories and decides which one is the most likely to be what the player wanted.
@awwbees This behavior can be disabled or further extended in the assist settings, but most people like the overall feel I came up with for the default choice.
@Nifflas We did something similar with touch controls in Static Sky.
The player wasn’t actually interacting with things as rendered + safety margin.
Instead we would construct an interaction mesh with a cell for each interactible. Each would start at normal size & shape, but then we warp them based on “importance” and time.
This coyote time solution handled:
The tap target had moved between deciding to tap and actually hitting the screen.
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