I've been wondering about that for a while now. Shouldn't it be SPACE instead? It's an awkward button to begin with.

What I mean is that even though you can use any button, why is it that ESC button is used instead of SPACE?

Personally, I feel like the controls are all over the place. I mean ALT, SHIFT and CTRL can sometimes be problematic (I've read about that somewhere about the Don'ts of making a GM game).

Shouldn't what we aim for be a more console-like controls where everything is placed next to each other? The ESC button should be the one that ends the game, which is fitting since it's isolated from other buttons. However, the arrow keys should be left to the right hand. Using the ENTER key for confirm is awkward since you cannot move and hit confirm at the same time - something you can do with console controllers. It becomes a slight annoyance for times when you have to chase NPCs (such as that skyblue pig in Tropical Adventure).

I suggest that the action buttons be Z, X and C. They are a comfortable distance from the arrow keys and easier to handle. C can be used for Confirm. X for cancel. Z for menu. If more actions are needed, you can use A, S, and D. It is much easier to get used to for the player.

I hardly believe that many of you think that it's a big deal or even a problem at all (due to the fact that you're all used to the ENTER-ALT-ESC defaults), but I've read some articles and good designers take this seriously.

This function will become your best friend. User-defined controls are in Verge just to cater to your needs.

Here are some reasons why I think the default controls are fine:

ENTER - The enter button is close to the directional keys, making it easy to reach. It's a large button. Think of how many times you type in search in a search engine and hit Enter, rather than clicking OK or something. However, enter probably doesn't have much use outside of the 'OK' button.
ALT - Alt makes a nice key, as long as you *never* have to hit it in conjuction with any of the other default buttons, because that causes bad things like fullscreen toggling, window options or start menus to come up. Alt is a nice key, despite the fact when used in combination with the other keys it executes a Windows Key Shortcut. Alt is close to both Space and Enter (fortunately and unfortunately), and feels considerably nicer to hit continuously than CTRL. I don't know, it makes a good cancel button anyway.
ESC - Escape is a nice small button out of the way. Escape makes a great quit buttton to escape the program, as the name implies
SPACE - Space is a huge button. It also finds a nice use as a menu, a jump button.

However, I'd rather have console type key setup:

Z - Cancel
X - OK
A - Snes 'X' button / Start
S - Snes 'Y' button / Select
Q - Left shoulder key.
W - Right shoulder key.

The caveat of console key setups is that if you ever have naming dialogues, now you can't just use the modern keyboard typing to input if you also want to have the old-school method of hitting OK and CANCEL and move the cursors, because OK and CANCEL would be a likely be letter keys. I guess you could temporarily not use the b1 - b4 in your code to avoid the keyboard conflicts, but then gamepad users sadly have to put down the controller and use the keyboard.

Also, in my opinion there's no such thing as horrible controls. You just have to adapt a little bit. Although I admit some games have had awesome easy-to-master controls, take Viewtiful Joe for Gamecube for instance. When games actually do have crappy controls, it's not where the buttons are mapped, it's the actual response to your input.

McFAIL?

Darn it! People thinking up and implementing my ideas before I do...

I think original verge used the buttons it did because it wanted to avoid using alphanumeric/symbol buttons for whatever reason. But yeah, it's kinda weird.

Most PC games use ESC for the menu. I realize some people might be going for more of a console feel in their games, but most people playing verge games will be pc gamers, and I imagine most of them are used to ESC for the menu. I would certainly be thrown off if it was space bar, anyway.

I think we have very different views on what actually constitutes a RPG (*cough* *cough* adventure games with statistics don't count as RPGs *cough*)... but I'll skip that argument for now, as tempting as it may be.

Stick with what works unless the change offers a fairly noticeable advantage, otherwise you'll just frustrate people.

I wasted two minutes of my life trying to accelerate my damned car in the Driver 3 demo, probably because the game was ported from a console game, and the reality that it was running on PC, and not a console, seemed to have been lost on some nut in the game design department.

You have to keep in mind the platform you're developing these games for. The controller configurations are much more dependent on the platform than the game's genre, at least in terms of buttons to do things like pull up menus, as opposed to actual game actions.

Anyway, I think you've been playing on consoles way too long if you think using the ESC key is inconvenient. Lazy bastard...

Quote:Originally posted by Omni

That is true. ...Most PC games do use ESC.

//useless comment

Are you arguing that the platform has no relevance? Come on, at least try to come up with an argument...

No, you misunderstand. I was berating myself for agreeing with you without having anything else to add to the argument.