Here are some new things I’ve been working on. Might seem a bit little, but I’ve been busy with other stuff as well— including Zelda. Enjoy!

Controller support!
This will sadly only work in the Windows version, but it works wonders. You can also remap the controller just like the keypad, or disable it and use joy2key instead.

Game Maker’s support for gamepads is really limited. There were a lot of strange issues and limitations that I had to write my own code to recognize when buttons are pressed or released, and to keep the lag down. (Doing a lot of calls to the joystick destroys the frame rate for some reason.)

Not only that, but there’s also the issue that the state of a joystick button can change in the middle of the step. So the game could think a button is pressed in the beginning of the step, yet when checking later near the end of the step, the button seems to have been unpressed. My replay recording system did not account for this, which caused it to break.

To top it off, I had to write my own alternative of io_clear to work with controllers as well. I normally use io_clear when opening a menu, it makes sure that the same button press can’t both open the menu and select an item on that menu in the same frame. There’s no equivalent for io_clear for joysticks, so I implemented it into my own button pressed & released system.

Playtesting!
Recently, I started a playtesting group and had some of my friends and peers join in. Recently, I sent out a build of Mobility via there. For playtesting, I ask players to set up OBS to record gameplay footage, record their playthrough, then using WeTransfer to get the video file back to me.

I’ve been watching a lot of GDC talks lately, and one that jumped out was a talk from Adriaan, who made Hidden Folks, explaining his playtesting procedures (http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024132/Playtesting-A…). A lot of points hit home for me, in particular watching people play instead of making them, say, fill out large forms, or instead of taking their suggestions literally, took at the reason why they’re giving that feedback and solve the core issue.

There are quite a few points of interest these tests brought up. Like, everyone immediately understands that you have to activate all blocks to complete the level, with little explanation. It also clearly shows the less effective things, like players not knowing they can do certain actions they need in the later levels of the game, like long jumping, restarting, or opening the map.

To counter this particular problem, I redesigned the tutorial to explain the extra jumps you can do. It now explains backflipping, long jumping, and double jumping up front. I explain these by drawing arrows showing off the intended movement that the player should mirror to pull it off. Some other rooms on the same ship have also gotten a light redesign.

And this is the stuff I’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks or so.

Game ending
Slowly but surely I’m beginning to see the end of this game’s development! The most important bit of work left to do is to create the last world of the game. My past games didn’t really work towards an epic climax, so I’m planning to amend that with this game.

Trailer
I really want to have a nice trailer for Mobility. The current plan is to create a little teaser trailer sometime soon, then make the full trailer once the game’s near finished.

I’ve created one other trailer for my games so far: Hexaria. Looking back to it, it’s kinda bad. It doesn’t really have clear goal the trailer tries to show, and doesn’t explain gameplay well enough to interest people. I’m planning to invest a lot of time on this, and I’m planning to make the teaser once I’ve included some small fixes.

Endgame
I’m planning to add a little achievement system in for players who completed the game and would like to invest some extra time into getting better and higher scores. The way I’m conceiving it now is that players can ‘overclock’ spaceships, where your score on all levels on the ship is combined into a cumulative counter and you need to bring that down to make the spaceship faster. And maybe, if you do well enough, you can unlock an extra difficult bonus challenge!

To end for today, here’s a gif from the updated pause screen: