Designing for Two Players and One Keyboard & Mouse

Project Overview

In a current game design project, I am working on a competitive multiplayer game where one player is an attacker (white square at the bottom center of the screen) and the other has to defend their building by clicking on turrets (white triangles around the map.) The attacker has to gather the yellow square keys in order to unlock the doors to escape map.

One of the original design goals was to make the controls only use Keyboard & Mouse. I decided to make the player use the keyboard solely and the defender solely use the mouse. This brought along a lot of challenges that I had to face and deal with for both attacker and defender.

Control Design

The attacker was not too difficult because I could just give them the basic WASD controls. Movement was all I had planned for them so it was much simpler. The defender on the other hand was much more difficult to implement and balance because I had more things to take into account. For example, I have to account for the defender's sensitivity. After some playtesting, players found it difficult to have to click on the mouse because of how high the sensitivity was. Also, the turrets were originally really small so defenders found it frustrating to try and click on the turrets. This made me increase the size of the turrets since the Attackers never went close to them so collision was never a problem.

After a lot of playtesting, I came to find out that there was not any catch up mechanics for the defender. The attacker could just run through the map and it was difficult for the defender to try and win. A few solutions to this that I added afterwards to balance things out:

- Bigger and Faster bullets for Turrets

- Right Click spawns a bomb that slows the enemy

- Attacker no longer gets stuck when moving into walls

- Barriers have health and get destroyed for some time after getting shot

The attacker afterwards had a much harder time trying to get through the level. This made the game much more balanced and left the win rate around even for both players.

Lessons Learnt / Post Mortum

One of the biggest things I learned after this project was how to make a game fair for two different players on two different control schemes. I found challenges like how to make the game easier for players that have a hard time selecting items, as well as trying to balance the game itself. In future games I make, I am going to try and keep in mind the control scheme and how it can either be designed around or designed into.