Thoughts about combat

[x4000]

Keith and I are playing exclusively with the keyboard at the moment, just FYI. We both grew up as keyboard-only players before the mouse was popular (at least, I know he was into some games that were keyboard-only). We haven't even added gamepad support yet, honestly. It will be in before alpha, but he game is fine without it.

Once that's in I'll probably play with the gamepad when I play for fun, because I like the feel a gamepad brings to such a game, but for testing I expect I'll always be keyboard-only. If you're comfortable with keyboard-and-mouse, you'll be just fine with keyboard-only. You use your mouse hand to hit number keys to fire off spells, for the most part, if you want wasd. So far we are using mouse hand for he arrow keys and left hand for the tab key and the number keys, though. As in old-school games. This has the same keybinding support from ai war, so you can make it comfortable to you.

A gamepad is definitely NOT required unless you like that gamepad experience. And I imagine those who do already have a gamepad, or wouldnt mind getting one. Hope that makes sense!

[Nalgas]

The implication of your remarks about the controls in this thread and other threads is that the game will play better with a USB controller than it will with a keyboard and mouse.  From a sales perspective, however, this seems like an imprudent choice for an indie developer.  Is it wise to design an indie PC game that requires customers to purchase an additional peripheral in order to enjoy the game as the developers envisioned it?  Many mainstream gamers are already skeptical about purchasing indie titles, and it seems to me like designing the game to work best with controller support amounts to putting an additional hurdle in front of already skeptical buyers.

Let's see.  Braid, Trine, Super Meat Boy, Recettear, Toki Tori, Beat Hazard, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter...and those are just a handful I picked out quickly from my Steam game list that are indie games from the past few years that play best with a controller and have done reasonably well for themselves (and I would argue Audiosurf is in that category, too, but most people look at me funny when I say that).  I'm sure I missed roughly a few dozen others, give or take a couple.  They're all playable without a controller, too (for varying degrees of "playable").  Doesn't seem to have hurt most of them too much.

I personally can't imagine not having a controller hooked up to my computer.  I've had one since before anything really supported them much, because holy crap is a lot of stuff awful in an emulator with just a keyboard.  Unlike on a console, I have the option of choosing the best input device for the job, and I'm going to take advantage of it (or sometimes the worst one, just for fun: play anything that isn't DDR using a DDR pad and hilarity ensues).

[Castruccio]

I don't dispute that there are controller-driven indie PC titles that have been successful.  My question is simply one about design prudence.  If you're going to spend time and money to develop a great looking game like AVWW, then I suspect that you would want there to be as few obstacles as possible standing between that game and its potential buyers.  I don't contend that it is impossible to sell a controller-driven game to PC gamers, but I do want too raise the question of whether incorporating a controller-driven interface amounts to taking a risk.  In the case of the Meat Boy games that risk was clearly worth it.  There are a number of games, however, where that risk did not pay off.  

If the game plays a smoothly with a keyboard as Chris says it will, then the risk I am drawing attention to is significantly mitigated.