Where’s the mouse?

Once we had Chime building for the Xbox 360, it didn’t work straightaway as a playable game; an automatic port can only do so much. There are many differences between a PC and a games console, the most obvious being the controls.

Chime was playing really well with a mouse and keyboard, so the first step was to map the pre-existing keyboard controls to buttons on the pad. This was enough to get a playable version, but work didn’t stop there. The controls just didn’t feel right, and as it’s the most important part of the game, we re-coded and tweaked the controls throughout the entire development phase to get them just so, including adding support for the analogue sticks. It is important to give players choice in how they play, so in Chime, you’ll find different ways of doing the same action.

You can rotate shapes using the right stick, or use a number of different buttons. We tried out various combinations during development, and also experimented with many different ways of how the right stick is used to rotate the shape.

In the same spirit of providing choice, you can also move shapes using either the left stick or the d-pad. To ensure there was no advantage to using either, we made sure the d-pad behaves just like the analogue stick by developing all sorts of interesting mathematics. Well, interesting to us coders anyway.

We hope you agree there is a control combination in the final game to suit everyone.

Barry Northern – Lead Programmer