"Any-setup keys": so every player can play your game, whatever their CPC or emulator

[cpcitor]

Thanks all for your feedback!

TL;DR: a game is a kind of show, it must run as smoothly as possible. Also the surprising choice in Ritman and Drummond’s Batman and similar isometric games.

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@Anthony_Flack

Honestly I think a redefine key option is simple, flexible solution and doesn’t really take up much memory.

When I played on my CPC I overwhelmingly preferred games that allow to redefine keys.

I might do that for my later game(s). Simplicity is desirable still.

@Typhon

Yeah, I make all my games now have fully redefinable keyboard controls, as well as joystick/controller equivalents. I reuse the same modules and methods for doing so across games, optimising and improving as I reuse them.

Yes, excellent approach! Do you allow several keys for the same action?

@lightforce6128

• It would need a close examination, but the more keys are considered, the more ghost keys can sneak in. This will usually not happen on an emulator, but on real hardware this can be a problem.

Well, since the emulator imitates keypresses on the virtual keyboard of the emulated CPC, you always get the CPC-side ghosts, and perhaps some more issues with the emulation setup.

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By the way, the wiring of the CPC keyboard was chosen to avoid ghosts for the joysticks, but not so much for the arrow keys. Did you know that pressing left arrow, up arrow and copy, it causes a ghost “right arrow”? You can check that in any CPC or emulator: switch on, quickly press left,up,copy then release. Without a ghost the cursor would be on the rightmost column, instead it is on the R of ready.

That might be one argument for a fixed layout, well studied to avoid ghosts.
Or a “redefine keys” routine that warns the user about ghosts and suggest solutions.

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Do you remember the strange menu interaction in “Batman” (and similar games by the same team)?

• Throughout the menu, ENTER to select option (actually the big main RETURN key, not the ENTER of the numeric pad).
• Any key to move cursor (downwards).

• When redefining keys, SHIFT to finish.
• One good thing, for each of the actions (directions, jump, carry, pause) you could define many keys.

I understand that it has a property that whatever the setup, if you can press Enter and enough other keys, you’re good.

But, it was clumsy to navigate, required many keypresses to redefine the keys, and you had to go through that on every game load to define keys or adjust the sound (the default option, well-named “nasty”, had this continuous melody while you walked all the time), and the “sensitivity”. I found it so strange and like a chore to do again each time the game was loaded.

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Back to a more general view, I don’t really know how much of a constraint it is for the player that a game offers a fixed yet multi-habit-many-keys layout like I did on Just Get 9 and suggested in the first post of the topic. No one commented this so far.

Plot twist: when I tested Just Get 9 in browser on an Android phone (so, without a keyboard), the Android on-screen keyboard did not offer arrow keys, but I could type letters and press “Enter” to send them and it worked. .