dev.log: Gnomes and Goblins and Controls (Blue)

This week, I talk about my experience playing Gnomes and Goblins, and __

Gnomes and Goblins is an adoreable VR only title where you as a player interact with tiny goblin creatures. They look at you with large eyes, they sing, they dance, talk to you in not-words – it’s great. Well, more accurately, it could be great, but the game suffers from some major issues. Baffling issues, frankly.

The game is supposedly a full version of a demo released about four years ago, which instantly became a VR cult classic. It had you peering into small spaces, looking at the little lives of tiny beings, like a doll house sort of experience. It’s beyond charming, and the shear enjoyability of the experience makes one wonder how this “full” version of the game came to be. The animations are just as adorable as before, the sound design is on point, the colors, the everything about it is beautiful and inviting – except for actually playing the game. Instead of looking in at the little lives of little people, you spend most of the game the same size as them; still cute, but not nearly as enjoyable. Additionally, the game constantly propels you forward, with someone urging you forward into the next area before you really feel like you’ve had an opportunity to fully enjoy the one you are currently in. Most grievously of all, however, is how the game moves you around. A poorly optimized framerate combined with sliding locomotion that isn’t fully controlled by the player is a surefire way to kill a VR game.

No matter how beautiful a game, poor design decisions are absolutely going to kill it. In this case, I suspect the team at WeVR saw how popular the demo was, got over ambitious, and created an experience without really playtesting it. They were confident that they already had a winning formula (which they did), so they went ahead and created it, forgetting to focus their efforts on what made the demo successful in the first place. Aesthetic is more than just the visual and audio design of a game! Gnomes and Goblins successfully expands on the visual and audio aesthetic of the original, but neglects the mechanical aesthetic. The end result is a poor simulacrum of what could have been great.

Just look at these guys – they didn’t deserve this!
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/02/jon-favreaus-gnomes-goblins-vr-game-debuts-on-september-23-after-5-years-of-work/

I had some thoughts about controls while playing Star Wars Squadrons (a game I’ve already talked about a bit on here). Squadrons has some pretty tight controls, that I prefer to enjoy with a gamepad. There was one glaring issue I was having with the game though, and that was with the drifting mechanic. In order to “drift” in the game, the default control setup has you press and hold the L3 button (pushing in on the joystick until it clicks), and then while still holding it down, pivoting the joystick.

When I was first playing the game, I didn’t even know this was a problem – the controls seemed perfect to me. As I’ve continued playing, and gotten more capable of more advanced maneuvers, the default controls have a very obvious issue, in that effectively performing this advanced maneuver is basically impossible. As a result, I’ve had to re-bind the controls, moving a few things around in ways that make sense, and re-learn how to fly a space ship with these new controls.

I wonder, though, if the default controls are actually bad or not. Certainly, they aren’t great for some of the more complicated things you can do in the game, but when first learning the game you don’t really need to be able to do those things. I’m pretty much always thinking about the on-boarding experience of every game I play, but a control scheme being an intentional on-boarding device had never occurred to me. At some point in play testing the game, the decision had to have been made to prioritize the default controls making sense to a player new to the game over the default controls being effective for a veteran of the game – and I just think that is so cool! Changing the controls to better match my play style is part of the experience of playing the game. In the future, I’m going to be keeping my eye out for other games that use this technique, as well as opportunities to use it myself.

The controls aren’t perfect, but I think that’s actually kind of the idea.
Source: https://www.polygon.com/star-wars-squadrons-guide-walkthrough/21497567/beginners-tips-tricks-controls-targeting-power-drift-turn-loadout