[casual_games] Use of keyboard on casual games

[Kerpelman, Todd]

As a general... uh... "best practices guideline that does not
necessarily constitute a hard-and-fast rule", I find that keyboard (or
right click) commands work best as an optional "power user" interface.
That is, give players the ability to play the entire game with just the
mouse. But if there are places where it makes sense to let players use
keyboard commands in addition, go for it.

Granted, part of that is because we have chat in our games, and run into
annoying situations where players are trying to play the game via
keyboard input while the chat window still has focus. If you don't
include chat in your game, this isn't as much of an issue. 

But still, if your player can play the game with their mouse in one
hand, and a phone / beer / cigarette / cup of coffee / crying baby /
etc. in the other, that's usually a good thing.

--Todd


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 07:22:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jose Marin <jose_marin2 at yahoo.com.br>
Subject: [casual_games] Use of keyboard on casual games
To: casual_games at igda.org
Message-ID: <830875.10875.qm at web36701.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi.

This question could look a little silly, but I think it's very
important:
Every casual game must allow the user control the game via mouse, or
it's ok to use the keyboard to that?

It's a design decision, because some kinds of games could be more
playable using the keyboard.

What do you think about this?

Regards

Jose