Kalin wrote:
Anyone remember using I, J, K, and M in games because we didn't have arrow keys?
Yes!
I don't know these things to be true, but here is my theory I made up just now about different key combinations.
In the 80's, Dawn of PCs, we had these small keyboards that were combined with the computer hardware. Think Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Atari 800. "
IJKM"
as a shape is visually intuitive, and you can see why it might be an early choice. It's also a choice that would work across the ridiculously varied keyboard choices of the time.
"
Why not use the arrow keys?"
you might ask. In the 80's, most of the PCs didn't have them or they were weirdly arranged. The computers we played games on back them were home computers, not work computers. If I remember right, it was a little bit rare to move the cursor "
inside"
of text. You would mostly add characters and then backspace over mistakes.
"
Okay, then why not use WASD in the 80's?"
I think we hadn't discovered yet that the familiar upside-down-T of a modern arrow key formation is a more ergonomic choice. You can fit three fingers over it simultaneously, with the middle finger hitting up or down. And you don't fidget and jam your fingers as much. But it took the prevalent full-keyboard design of PC clones in the 90s to convert us to the upside-down-T.
Then once we were all trained on that, laptops came along. I say "
came along"
- they were with us from the start of PCs in some clunky form or another. But only in maybe the last 10 years, have they become more popular than dedicated desktop machines.
And once you have a laptop with no arrow keys or bad arrow keys, then you've got the same problem as the "
IJKM"
people in the 80's had. But this time, your society knows that "
IJKM"
sucks compared to upside-down-T, so you end up with "
WASD"
. I have no explanation for why "
IJKL"
didn't become a convention instead of "
WASD"
, but I can kind of see it being more ergonomic for mouse+keyboard games.
And if you're playing DROD on a laptop, you just get to suffer.
Wild speculations above. It's probably only 62% true.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals |
twitch stream |
youtube archive (NSFW)
, though their reliant on having those pageup/down keys. I wonder is I would play slower on a Numpad but maybe that's just my unfamiliarity with it. 
.
- the tilted box is certainly a pretty unique layout so it's not surprising it felt awkward! Out of interest what DROD game have you started on and how did you discover DROD?
