Rather than necroing a thread (for the second time), I''ll simply reference it. The question is what you could design with just one button for input, and there are lots of clever designs in that thread. I''ll modify the requirements somewhat, breaking things into two categories:

1. Directions + Fire button You can use a mouse/joystick/gamepad/direction keys to control movement and a single button to initiate (or halt) a certain action.
2. Fire button only Nothing else. See what you can come up with.

Continuing from the linked thread, two ideas are fairly obvious:

1. Gradius-/Nemesis-/R-Type-style games: Why would you ever stop firing? You usually hold on to the primary fire button pretty much all the time, except when using your secondary (which is typically a limited resource like some sort of "megabomb"). So why not have auto-primary fire and use the fire button to trigger the "secondary"?
2. Sports games. You can make an adequate football (soccer) game with a single fire button. You can make a perfect tennis game with a single fire button (this is my focus at the moment), especially with an analog button.

Yes, you can distinguish between digital and analog fire buttons. Tennis Game Using Analog Directions + Analog Fire Button Depression characteristics ("touch") - rate of depression, force/intensity of depression - directly vary shot characteristics. Shot stance (forehand, backhand) are selected based on position of ball relative to player. A fully extended movement (running) + fully depressed fire button with the ball some distance away yields a diving shot (watch out on concrete!) On PC keyboards/gamepads, analog control can be simulated somewhat by incrementing deflectiong/depression the longer the key/button is held down. (Feels weird, but is an acceptable workaround.) What are your ideas?

Anyone here play Wario Ware on the GBA? I played the ''demo'' avalible via Wario World on the Gamecube and its quite addictive. Its basically this very same style of game. You get short (literally 5 to 10 seconds long) games played rapidly in sucession. You win a game, you win a point. Because they''re so fast (and so many different ones) the controls *have* to be simple so they can be picked up straight away.

Equally the Mario Party games have a similar slant. Simple, quick games with limited controls. Not the most compelling of games but good fun and cheap on the re-released games now.

Unfortunatly I''m all out of actual ideas myself right now. The best I can think of would be some kind of skiing game - gravity keeps you constantly accelerating downwards (and lets be silly and say no terminal velocity so you really do get faster and faster forever). Then just a left/right/jump controls to avoid the usual obstacles, tree, elk, etc. And no brake!

how about a fighting game?
combos of different directional buttons with the action button makes different moves.

quote: Original post by AcRiD_aCiD
how about a fighting game?
combos of different directional buttons with the action button makes different moves.

Did you know that some early Street Fighter arcade cabinets had analog buttons? And consider all the special moves that require some stick jiggling to get off (fireballs, hurricane kicks, flash kicks...)

That''s a pretty good one.

Fire button only

You control a single turret in a 2d side view of a battlefield. You''re at the center and enemies approach from both sides. You shoot in arcs a la Scorched Earth. Firing causes recoil which has two consequences: different angles = different ranges, and the only way to change the direction between left and right is to cause enough recoil to tip the barrel over 90 degrees.

Possible addition: holding the fire button before releasing it for more power which translates to greater range and more recoil.

Well the Atari 2600 only has one input button on the controller, so that's a few hundred games that you can make.

[edited by - botman2 on March 7, 2004 12:27:03 AM]

Morse code was mentioned in the last thread. A Morse learning program that doesn't suck would be cool (I'm too lazy to figure out those that are available - and so are most people).

I wanted to make a one button game some time ago. It was supposed to be a Tarzan swinging from trees game - in a jungle there are a series of support points. The player is tied with a rope to one of the support points. Whenever he presses the button, the rope to the current support point dissapears, and a rope to the next one appears. The player has to navigate around the jungle, avoiding all sort of obstacles (moving or not).

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Pax Solaris

[edited by - Diodor on March 8, 2004 1:31:50 AM]

Diodor: heh, sounds like Jungle Hunt. Classic game.

i just say summergames!

instead of shaking your joystick from left to right just hit the one button as fast as you can. (and be sure to buy a new keyboard soon...)
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maybe a frogger clone with a predefined path.
just hit the button at the right time to jump.
the difficulty would be that you can''t press it everytime you have a chance not to die.
(imagine a gap in the traffic on the street. you eventually have to wait long enough to jump two times or you''ll get stuck on the street)

Jungle Hunt was sweet.

Maybe a "mindless marcher" game, like Lemmings, where one click makes your little guy change directions, and two makes him jump (just set it up so that if he changes directions twice in a row he jumps in the original direction). You could have all kinds of different mazes and obstacle courses that way.