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One of the controller prototypes[/box]A couple of weeks ago Valve invited some indie developers over in secret to try out their newly announced controller, Gamasutra are reporting. The outlook seems very promising.
Planetoid Pioneers developer Dan Tabar tried out Gearbox's FPS-RPG Borderlands and was impressed by the prominent dual touchpads that the Steam controller sports. "These are not like laptop trackpads," Tabar said. "Everyone is like, 'Oh we're replacing thumbsticks with trackpads, oh shit.' But this is not at all like a laptop trackpad. It just feels good. It's a challenge to verbally describe it. When [your thumb] moves toward the outer zone of the trackpad, you can feel that. [The zones on the trackpad] are independent of each other." He did say the haptic feedback was "going crazy" but chalked it up to the controllers having literally just come out of a 3D printer.
Double Fine developer Chris Remo got one to play Double Fine's own upcoming game Broken Age (aka the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter). He thought it worked well as a mouse, noting that "It doesn't feel like a trackpad." It seems very easy to set up and get used to, saying "There was almost no learning curve as far as accuracy goes" and "We just plugged it in, and it worked."
On Twitter AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! developer Ichiro Lambe talked about his experiences with the controller which he secretly got to play with last month. Though Twitter's format doesn't aid detailed explanations Lambe attempted to explain the controller haptics. "From a tech standpoint, think about something that can click whenever you tell it to" which sounds something like the slight vibration that Android phones give when you press an on-screen button. "Simple example: you move your finger 1" up, and it ticks 10 times. You flick it up, and it starts ticking, like you've spun a wheel." In other tweets he mentions the pad behaving like a virutal trackball with its own momentum. He also described it as "pretty much the perfect gamepad for playing FPSes."
Finally on his own Tumblr blog Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes shared his thoughts on it when he got to try out his own game and also Derek Yu's Spelunky. With the left pad for movement and the right pad acting as a stand in for the four face buttons on a more traditional controller. After some initial fiddling with TV settings he eventually sat down with each game and concluded that "the controller worked great," elaborating that if he had to chose between the Steam controller and an Xbox 360 controller he'd choose the latter, simply because it was more familiar, but "if tomorrow all game controllers were wiped off the earth and the only option was the Steam Controller [...] I don’t think gaming would miss a beat"
One of the controller prototypes[/box]A couple of weeks ago Valve invited some indie developers over in secret to try out their newly announced controller, Gamasutra are reporting. The outlook seems very promising.
Planetoid Pioneers developer Dan Tabar tried out Gearbox's FPS-RPG Borderlands and was impressed by the prominent dual touchpads that the Steam controller sports. "These are not like laptop trackpads," Tabar said. "Everyone is like, 'Oh we're replacing thumbsticks with trackpads, oh shit.' But this is not at all like a laptop trackpad. It just feels good. It's a challenge to verbally describe it. When [your thumb] moves toward the outer zone of the trackpad, you can feel that. [The zones on the trackpad] are independent of each other." He did say the haptic feedback was "going crazy" but chalked it up to the controllers having literally just come out of a 3D printer.
Double Fine developer Chris Remo got one to play Double Fine's own upcoming game Broken Age (aka the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter). He thought it worked well as a mouse, noting that "It doesn't feel like a trackpad." It seems very easy to set up and get used to, saying "There was almost no learning curve as far as accuracy goes" and "We just plugged it in, and it worked."
On Twitter AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! developer Ichiro Lambe talked about his experiences with the controller which he secretly got to play with last month. Though Twitter's format doesn't aid detailed explanations Lambe attempted to explain the controller haptics. "From a tech standpoint, think about something that can click whenever you tell it to" which sounds something like the slight vibration that Android phones give when you press an on-screen button. "Simple example: you move your finger 1" up, and it ticks 10 times. You flick it up, and it starts ticking, like you've spun a wheel." In other tweets he mentions the pad behaving like a virutal trackball with its own momentum. He also described it as "pretty much the perfect gamepad for playing FPSes."
Finally on his own Tumblr blog Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes shared his thoughts on it when he got to try out his own game and also Derek Yu's Spelunky. With the left pad for movement and the right pad acting as a stand in for the four face buttons on a more traditional controller. After some initial fiddling with TV settings he eventually sat down with each game and concluded that "the controller worked great," elaborating that if he had to chose between the Steam controller and an Xbox 360 controller he'd choose the latter, simply because it was more familiar, but "if tomorrow all game controllers were wiped off the earth and the only option was the Steam Controller [...] I don’t think gaming would miss a beat"
