Aaron and I had a very important business meeting this weekend at our head office (cough) The Coach and Horses. Among the things we discussed were throwing ideas about on a potential next project after Paradroid, and debating wether we need to have gamepad support in Paradroid. As I’ve mostly just used keys/mouse on the games I play on the Mac, and just stick to playing most big games on the PS4, I hadn’t given it much thought until now.

The thinking is that it’s a C64 game we’re remaking that was designed to be played on an old cube-telly and a Competition Pro or Quickshot joystick, so it’s common sense really. Bonus points to the old farts who can remember both those joysticks. I had a Competition pro that lasted me through my Vic 20 and C64 years. Never used anything close to being as good, although the PS4 controllers I’m almost comfortable with now.

So I spent Sunday afternoon digging out my old wireless XBox 360 game pad as it turns out GMS2 does support either those or PS3 controllers. No PS4, otherwise I’d have just attempted it with that.

Another snag was that Microsoft (obviously) don’t provide drivers for using their XBox controllers on an Apple Mac. I mean, why would they?

Fortunately there’s a driver out there for people who’d like to use one anyway, and it was relatively painless to get the device linked up to my Mac and then start looking at the code side of things.

In the old days of programming a game to work with a joystick, it was pretty much just peeking a location to see if the number within had changed, which would indicate the switch was joined and the game should react accordingly. Nowdays there’s start buttons, back buttons, triggers, shoulder buttons, directional sticks and four flippin’ fire buttons. Only basic joystick use is really required for this game so I set up the transfer game in its current state with enough code to be readable and for Aaron to make use of the source to do the same with the main game.

Once the games finished I’ll probably take out all the joystick code and stick it into some kind of reusable script so gamepad support can be dropped in to anything else we write that follows Paradroid.

It was nice getting away from the workings of the board building routine that I’m still tinkering with , while still working on the game itself as that way I don’t feel that I’m wasting time when something needs a bit more thought. I just do another part of the game instead that won’t need much thinking, such as tinkering with sounds.

No new screenshots this time as there isn’t much new to see as yet. Nip over to Aarons blog via the link on the right and you can see an example of the in-game graphics being switched to heavy metal, original etc.

Categorised as: Development | Game Studio 2 | Paradroid