You could have a game where the player constantly moved forward (like nibbles). You begin with contantly turning to the left and pushing the button change the direction you turn, movement forward would be accomplished by holding down the button.

quote:

---

Original post by Hardguy
You could have a game where the player constantly moved forward (like nibbles). You begin with contantly turning to the left and pushing the button change the direction you turn, movement forward would be accomplished by holding down the button.

---

Nice idea. Might work slightly better if default curved left, and button down curved right - that way you get a nice symmetry between the two button states Though assymetry could have potential... the hard part is that by making it left/straight on, correcting oversteer becomes pretty much impossible.

rmsgrey: Yeah, that might be better. Would be fun to see it implemented.

Just came up with another idea. Text adventure in morse code!
Might get a while for newbies to get into though.

I present to you an action-packed game, set during the hell of WWII: Morse Warrior . :-)

// Kanzetsu

I made a game based on the Space Out / Copter game Michalson talked about. You basically fly a plane in a cave (??) and there are floating wall every two seconds. It took me less than a week of work to complete it, however the graphics suck.

Only one button:
mouse pressed = plane is trusted up
mouse not pressed = plane is dragged back by gravity

Such simplicity make the game very addictive. But believe me it takes real mad skillz at some point.


Here is a screen:


I will try too post a link so that you can play with it, but I don't have anywhere I can host it, maybe I could try the showcase.

______________________________
Oooh, you found the horadric cube!


[edited by - Coincoin on December 29, 2002 12:10:44 PM]

Very cool! I wonder what kind of powerups, obstacles, and new gameplay elements you could add to that.

I have two points to make.

*Not* pressing the button is a valid strategy just as much as pressing the button. The lack of action is still a player decision. This should not be overlooked. While a "fire" button is not being used, one could charge up the weapon that it triggers, as an example. Another example is in that worm game, where falling is just as important as rising. So don''t always think of it as an on off switch - treat it like a toggle.

Second point: context sensitivity is incredibly useful for multiplying the use of a key. Note how Doom3''s fire button becomes a use button just as soon as you aim at a keypad or activatable object. In a Quake2 mod I made, the forward key double up as a punch key as soon as you were in range and facing an enemy - it gave them a quick fist to the head.

Context is great - you just have to isolate two or more elements of the player''s vocabulary that cannot be used at the same time depending on the situation. Then give that button different meanings in either situation. Easy!

One button can transmit Morse code, which is alphabetic, and thus can translate to a worded message, where it is sent as input into a recursive descent parser tied to a predicate calculus database of axioms to disambiguate semantics.

quote:

---

Original post by Hardguy
You could have a game where the player constantly moved forward (like nibbles). You begin with contantly turning to the left and pushing the button change the direction you turn, movement forward would be accomplished by holding down the button.

---

I realize this is a pretty old thread, but I just now came across it and had to reply (hoping to get some more discussion going). I came up with pretty much the same idea a couple months ago, with a few refinements. I think it could make a very playable game. Here''s the details of the concept I came up with:

1. Top-down view with player''s guy/vehicle/whatever center screen, but maybe a little towards the bottom of the screen (since the player is moving forward).

2. When the player''s guy rotates, view stays aligned to the guy, so the guy is always facing the top of the screen and the world rotates around him.

3. The guy turns continually to the left. Pressing and holding The Button makes him go straight, release and he circles to the right, press and release again and he circles to the left again (as suggested by HardGuy). I would add the following refinements:
a. When he first starts turning to the left, he turns very slightly, in a wide arc.
b. As he continues to turn left, he starts turning in a tighter and tighter arc. This would happen fairly quickly - only a second or so to go from a slight turn to a fairly tight loop. It would cap at a reasonable maximum turn rate, so even if the player kept turning left, he would never spin insanely.
c. As soon as the player presses The Button, he immediately goes straight.
d. When he releases The Button, he starts a slight turn to the right, which then tightens, etc. (same behavior as left turn).
e. Presses The Button, goes straight, releases, repeat from (a.), etc.

I think this control scheme could work very well. The player would intuitively do a lot of double-tapping, feathering, etc. with The Button to control his guy. For example, I want to go straight, so I''m holding The Button. Now I want to turn left, so I release The Button (which would make me go right), and immediately tap The Button to change to left. When my left turn starts to become to sharp, I would double-tap and essentially "reset" my sharp left turn to a broad turn again.

4. The guy continuously auto-fires. It would be one of those "shoot everything on the screen" kind of games where a player might normally have the fire button held down all the time anyway, so you don''t need a control for that.

5. The game would have a variety of different weapon pick-ups scattered around. When the guy runs over one, he immediately starts using that weapon. There would also be different powerups he could run over that would do things like change his speed, etc. So a lot of things a player might normally select with complicated controls, would instead by selected by steering his guy over a certain powerup. These would have to be strategically placed in the levels, and would be a significant part of level design.


So yes, I think you could do a very engaging, playable action game with nothing more that one button.

Any thoughts?

I like it, except for the shooting. It seems that the focus of the game is steering, and just having things in front of you getting shot would do little for it except giveplayers an excuse to turn more frequently. i''d rather see it as an obstacle course or pick-up race than some sort of combat course. Also, I think of the interface as being better in first-person, like Spectre. Remember Spectre? This control system would be neat for that kind of thing.