In the last post, I explained some of what went wrong with Fissure. I’m writing these posts not to pretend that I know how to write a good game, but to explain to myself where, and how, I’ve failed to do so. It’s also good practice for when I have some actually useful information to relate.

After its disastrous first outing, it took me a long time to come back to Fissure. I’d considered just forgetting about it and going on to the next one. But we have to correct our mistakes if we want to learn all we can from them.

In the first half, I mentioned that I’d spent a lot of time practicing flying my capsule to get used to the control scheme I’d adopted. That should have been a big red warning flag to me. Yes, there’s usually a learning curve to a new game. But context matters.

Recently, I bought The Witcher 2 and decided I’d play through the tutorial, just to get the feel of the controls. As some reviews will tell you, this is probably the worst thing to do if you want to learn how to play the game, because the tutorial throws every single combat and magical move the character can execute at you in quick succession. If you can’t figure out how to use one, you can’t progress through the tutorial. I almost gave up but I did pay for the fucking thing, so I figured I’d derive some entertainment from it. And it turns out the actual gameleads you through combat and so on at a reasonable pace.

I was willing to give The Witcher 2 another chance was because I’d paid for it. If I clicked on someone’s browser game out of idle curiosity, and found it painful to control, I would be clicking elsewhere within seconds. Easy come, easy go. If the people that played Fissure had had to pay for it (haw!), maybe they’d have stuck it out like I did and learned to fly it. But that’s hardly an option.

So: fix the controls.

I’ve since noticed that many WebGL developers handle rotation by click-and-drag with the mouse. This is a natural extension to the way it’s handled in most PC games. In the browser, you don’t have access to the raw mouse position deltas, so you’re forced to use click-and-drag instead. I didn’t care for this, but I’ve subsequently gotten used to it. I threw out the arrow keys and replaced them with click-and-drag. This provides a greater degree of control, and ease of familiarity for PC gamers.

Players commented that the controls seemed sluggish and unresponsive, so I’ve removed the gradual increase in thrust and replaced it with constant acceleration. Since I had already tossed out the requirement to ease up on a piece of salvage, players had no need for fine control.

I found that these two changes actually made the game more fun for me. Though I haven’t sprung it on anyone else yet, I’ll follow up in time to check reactions.