Introduction
The past few days have been a wonderful deep dive into prototyping and creating some big control systems for the submarine game. We are hammering down our final mechanics and developing the connections between the controls and the main experience. The large control system will live within one piece of Styrofoam and use the Iduino Leonardo board.
Progress Pictures
In the images above, you’ll find some prototyping ideas and a control schematic. The way our controls work with the Unreal game engine is by mapping the inputs from the microcontroller as presses on a keyboard. Since we have no potentiometers or value-based inputs, we can work with analog methods and map joystick/button inputs to specific keys on the keyboard.
The entire control system will consist of 1 joystick mapped to the WASD keys, one sonar and one repair button mapped to E and R, 2 fake power switches to stimulate the touch-based exploration, and 6 LEDs (4 of the 6 will be fake, while 2 will correspond to the repair and sonar buttons).
The entire piece of Styrofoam will be spray-painted and stylized to reflect the grungy metal material you find inside submarines. The goal of the control system is to immerse the player into the environment of the submarine; the buttons feel clicky, the switches feel heavy, and the joystick feels grounded and functional.
This Thursday, we’ll be doing some basic playtests using the new controls and level layout. There will be valuable feedback and opinions recorded to further improve and refine our experience.