I’m making a top-down game. The controls do not involve the top-down movement behavior, however. Rather, the player can move in four directions (without automatically angling toward the direction of movement) and look in four directions (which changes the angle of the player) with the aswd keys and the arrow keys. I think i’m going to add a small preferences menu where the choice can be manually made as to which set of keys controls which set of events, but I’ll start the demo with the looking around keys being the arrow keys. The reason for the lack of top-down behavior is because behavior is turn-based and the npcs get a turn, as well as the player. Each round is one second. Speed is measured by the number of actions in a turn. Each time an aswd key is pressed, the player moves 32 px in a specific direction, indicated by the key pressed, and each time the player moves 32 px in any direction, an action is used.
I have a choice to make. If the player is facing forward, and the a key is pressed, then the player crabwalks to the left. However, if the player is facing left, and the a key is pressed, then the player crabwalks down. Should I first employ this variable key system in which directional keys change depending on the angle the player is facing, or should I at first use a system in which the directional keys adapt according to the angle the player is facing so that the s key will always make the player go backwards, whether backwards in downward or to the right, and the w key is always forwards, whether that is upward or to the left.
I will, eventually, get around to using both settings, and giving the option in a preference menu, which to use, but I don’t want my demo to have a preference menu because I want my demo to be an exploration of how one and only one version of my most basic game mechanics will work. The pride I will get for having created a functional game, no matter how small, will be enough to carry me through with complexifying, I think, but you have to reach the top of the mesa before you can conquer the Mount Everest on top of it.