Hi all, first post, thanks for having me.

I have been developing games for a few years but not yet released anything. I have completed a few small games and currently developing my first serious attempt at publishing a game for Oculus Rift / any VR device. The controllers are much like Xbox/PlayStation etc with A and B on the right controller and X and Y on the left, and triggers and thumb-sticks on both sides. Developing on Unity although that shouldn't be a consideration.

I am wondering if there's a list or table or any resource that might guide me as to which buttons I should assign to certain functions. I have become aware that gamers become familiar with games faster if they follow generally accepted conventions for each button press.

The obvious ones might be: Right trigger for fire, Right thumb-stick for forward/back/left/right, A button (or Right Primary) for switching and restart etc and even that might not be best. Because I have played games my whole life on PC I am not familiar with these hand controllers and what each button should do.

Some examples I need are, which button for: in-game toggle to open help overlay, scrolling thru help pages, restarting current level, switching to next level, show scores (or some other data overlay) pause, quit, save.

Thanks for any help.

Hi. New here. Just a gamer. Just thought I'd put my 2 cents in. Are you in VR? Why are you using the buttons on the controllers? Just think of them like hands and fingers to access the digiworld. Put the buttons in VR. Hold, activate and rotate is really all you need your hands to do.

adrianl3d said:
I am wondering if there's a list or table or any resource that might guide me as to which buttons I should assign to certain functions.

The usual way is to think first about the actions you're doing, and then look at how those actions are done in other games. If you find two games using two different UIs for a particular action, see which way works better for you. Maybe set the other way as a user selectable option.

adrianl3d said:
Because I have played games my whole life on PC I am not familiar with these hand controllers and what each button should do.

I'd advise that you play a bunch of popular VR games just to get a feel for how they approach controls (free demos should be sufficient). Controls in VR don't really work like controls on a gamepad, even if the button layout has some surface similarities.

Quite a few of the top VR games don't really use any buttons. For example, Beat Saber uses either trigger interchangeably for clicking on things in menus, and during gameplay all the letter buttons are mapped to the pause menu - and that's it. No other button interactions.

adrianl3d said:
Right thumb-stick for forward/back/left/right

Locomotion (movement) in VR is a whole topic by itself. You could use stick-based movement like this, but something like 50% of your potential audience will get motion sickness this way (and instantly uninstall your game). Most of the successful titles either stick to letting the player walk around physically in the real world, or use a teleport system where you point the controller where you'd like to end up.

Thank you all for the input, I appreciate it.

I should have mentioned that the application is a flight simulator, so motion sickness for some is a given, and the existing thumbstick control is essential unless I opt for an airplane yolk type control which doesnt work well with a pair of 6DOF hand controllers. So the Right Thumbstick is throttle on/off (up/down) and yaw left/right, and the Left Thumbstick is climb/dive (up/down) and bank left/right.

What is needed is basically switching UI elements in and out as I listed in my OP. It is not really practical to use onscreen pointer type buttons, that was actually my first option but after several months of development it showed up as a bad design choice due to the requirements of my specific onscreen messaging and the need for thumbstick control so I was forced to change it to controller button control.

So I am left with deciding which of the remaining buttons to choose for my needs. These buttons are A, B and X, Y and both left and right triggers (I dont want to use the grip trigger). I was hoping there would be some kind of industry standard because talking to many players they say that a badly designed game uses all the wrong buttons and is not intuitive and just feels wrong, whereas a good design uses commonly used standards and an experienced gamer can almost play any game without much instruction because he instinctively knows which button will do which function. Thats the kind of convention I am talking about.

In the absence of such a list/convention I shall have to resort to Tom's suggestion and spend some time running thru existing games to try to find some commonalities between them.

adrianl3d said:
In the absence of such a list/convention I shall have to resort to Tom's suggestion and spend some time running thru existing games

Just do it. Nobody has published a list.