Gamepad support has been added in the latest release! :D

Gamepad support

You can review and customize the gamepad bindings from the in-game menu.
I’ve played through the entire game, including the secrets, with an XBox360 controller, using the bindings I set up as the defaults.

Default gamepad controls

• Action | Input

• ---

• Move and Aim | Analogue / D-pad

• Fly/Up | Bumpers

• Jump | A, L-Trigger

• Attack | B, X

• Wide view | Y

• fullscreen | Start

Note that holding “Fly” is the same as holding the “Up” direction. Just as with keyboard input, attacking while holding only Fly/Up will attack upward. Holding any horizontal direction will aim the blade in a horizontal direction even if Fly/Up is still being held.

Making practical controls for the gamepad

This might interest other developers. Unintuitively, it was trickier than I expected to make this game work with a controller, as some aspects of keyboard controls don’t translate quite as directly to the gamepad as I would have thought.

On the keyboard the arrow keys are used for movement and aiming, and because most people use three fingers on the arrows, you have more independent control, than with a thumb on a D-pad or analogue stick. In a sense, you have three fingers worth of control bandwidth on the keybaord arrows, but only one finger of control bandwidth on a D-pad. The same is true for an analogue stick.

As a practical example of why this was initially a problem, consider level flight in Down Ward. Level flight is a bit tricky, and isn’t something you really need to master until the first secret level, but you can’t beat that level without getting good at it.

To achieve level flight, you need to hold a horizontal direction, and incrementally tap Up for occasional flaps, much like a real bird. This is easy enough on the keyboard, where one finger holds a horizontal arrow, and another taps Up independently.

On a D-pad, you have to use one finger to alternate between holding a horizontal direction and tapping up. It’s worse on an analogue stick, where you have to alternate between holding a horizontal direction and incrementally holding an upward diagonal direction.

Complicating this is that aiming the blade attack is also done with the directional input.

My solution was to bind the shoulder/bumper buttons to Up, so you can use an independent finger to control the fly action. Though it’s important to remember that the “Fly” button is an “Up” button and will act accordingly. Likewise holding up on the D-pad will also begin flapping, just as on the keyboard.

I was initially worried that the hybrid behavior of the Fly/Up button would be confusing, but fortunately after playing through the game on a gamepad, it seemed to not really be an issue.