Hi. I am working on an overhead shooter, and I can''t decide which controls to use. I can''t really implement a testbed, because it would require too much work, so before simply guessing I decided to ask what people think. The game(as I said) is an overhead shooter. The units are robots, running around the map shooting at each other. The map scrolls both horizontally and vertically. Here are my choices: 1. GTA-like: left/right simply change the angle, and forward/backward moves the character in the direction it''s standing in. 2. Quake-like: a mouse would define where the robot is looking at, forward/backward would move the character, and left/right would do the sidesteps. I can''t decide which one is better. What do u think?

Cool !! I always wanted to make an overhead shooter because of my love of "Alien Breed".

Well I thought about this issue too once. If the robot can only shoot straight ahead (not up/down) then I would go for the arrow-keys...

What if the player wanted to turn around (180 degrees) ???
That would quickly become frustrating when using the mouse.

And when the robot is walking towards the bottom of the screen the left/right would become mirrored (spelling ok??).
Awkward when using the mouse, but people would properbly be more used to this situation when using the keys.

But I could be wrong. God knows I have before!!!

Go with the arrows!

Jaap

Hey try something like this, you move with arrows or
w
a s d

and turn it''s upper part with mouse, this allows it to move forward and fire to 180 decrees.

I saw once cool game like this but don''t remember it''s name

Time comes, time goes and I only am.

Thanx for the responce! I honestly didn''t think I''ll get it, because this is a very abstract quesion. I''ll probably go with arrows for movement/mouse for targeting.

To continue the topic... I haven''t seen too many realtime overhead shooters (especially multiplayer arenas), that''s why I''m working on one. I''m done with the tile engine, now I''m moving on to working on robots. I''d really like to communicate with people that can suggest design ideas, to make the game better, so if you have any ideas, please post them here.

I know this is not the right board to post this, but since noone seems to be reading Help Wanted, I''m looking for an artist that would be able to draw tiles and robots.

Make sure you can blast trough walls...That would be cool.

You should make it so that you can run as lil'' dude and snipe/use bazooka agains enemy robots, with sniper of course you could get his robot, This way you could also kill enemies that are more powerful than your bot. Also you could add chopters and aircrafts, You could also add wingmen and a extrapowerful multiplayer robot that needs 2 players, one for driving and shooting artillery gun and one for using miniguns or cannons. One cool feature would be APCs which unpack masses of little soldiers with bazookas and rilfes, you could also be in apc until you get a bot or drive it. If you want more, mail me! Archaon@online.tietokone.fi or just click my profile

Time comes, time goes and I only am.

IMHO, leave the mouse alone.. mlook is great for 3d but in 2d there are 2 ways to look, left or right assuming you arn''t implementing 3d emulation in 2d. The best 2d games I''ve played were keyboard only, keys for turn left/right, move forward/backward and fire are all you need with other keys deffined as needed for strafe, walk/run and other special functions as needed.

That said, if you really want to use a mouse there are 2 ways (that I can think of) to do it: SimiQuake style where moving the mouse changes the player''s direction and/or movement which I personaly think would be excessive for a 2d game although it would allow for dynamic turn speed (ie how fast you move the mouse = how fast your guy turns) this would probably lead to a 2d twitch game rather than one based on skill. The other option would be Diablo style where you point and click to move to or target something. Again I don''t think this works well (although this is what Nox does) as it becomes a game of who can move the mouse the fastest.

The advantage to using a keyboard interface is that the game can have more depth to it. Games like Quake don''t have a max turn rate meaning that you can crank the mouse speed up so high that your player can spin around faster than you can blink. With 2d this is probably something you don''t want as your purpose would be better served if the players had to take into account that they won''t instantly be able to hit something directly behind them.

To me the "classic" control setup for an overhead shooter would be to have the arrow keys move you in the direction you want to go, and then have combinations that would move you along the diagonals. So up and left would move you in a Northwesterly direction. Having left and right rotate would be too slow, and I think introducing a mouse + keyboard concept is a little heavy-handed for the type of thing you''re looking for.

Ut