What exactly does trackpad tuning do?

[lé Honk]

I just got the game,after watching iijeriichoii , pewdiepie and warowl play this.
After maxing out the sensitivity,I still feel the mouse moves too slow for me(I use a very small mouse pad and mouse movements,higher sensitivy suits me.).
So I turn on trackpad tuning,and the sensitivity bar drops,but I get better sensitivity.
But what did turning on this option do ?
I don't understand. Is it recommended to use this,or will I face troubles further down the line?

[bennett]

Yeah in my testing I determined that it is much easier to make very fine movements with a trackpad. Mouse users were getting hand cramp from trying to hold their hand very still, so I added an acceleration curve to make it less responsive to tiny movements on a mouse. It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

[lé Honk]

Originally posted by bennett:

Yeah in my testing I determined that it is much easier to make very fine movements with a trackpad. Mouse users were getting hand cramp from trying to hold their hand very still, so I added an acceleration curve to make it less responsive to tiny movements on a mouse. It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

but if it makes the game easier,is it not considered cheating ? You made the game,so you would be the best to answer this.

[Belchicola]

Originally posted by Abercrombie:

Originally posted by bennett:

Yeah in my testing I determined that it is much easier to make very fine movements with a trackpad. Mouse users were getting hand cramp from trying to hold their hand very still, so I added an acceleration curve to make it less responsive to tiny movements on a mouse. It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

but if it makes the game easier,is it not considered cheating ? You made the game,so you would be the best to answer this.

Of course not. All it does is make the mouse more responsive to your input. It means that you will have an easier time messing up, so you have to be more careful, but if you are precise enough and it doesn't cause hand discomfort, you may like it.

[goblinboy gaming]

Originally posted by Abercrombie:

Originally posted by bennett:

Yeah in my testing I determined that it is much easier to make very fine movements with a trackpad. Mouse users were getting hand cramp from trying to hold their hand very still, so I added an acceleration curve to make it less responsive to tiny movements on a mouse. It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

but if it makes the game easier,is it not considered cheating ? You made the game,so you would be the best to answer this.

it's not cheating to have a controls setting to make the controls better for each individual player's tastes lol

[buddy]

Originally posted by bennett:

It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

Your testers were morons. Nearly all of the negative reviews are from people complaining about the mouse acceleration, and most of them don't even realize they can turn it off, because you named it something weird just so people wouldn't immediately turn it off - which is what most people would do, because mouse acceleration is trash.

[buddy]

Go ahead and check out the negative reviews, a (not so) surprisingly large amount of them are people complaining about the controls, and many of them actually use the words "mouse acceleration", or describe aspects of mouse acceleration, then go on to complain that they can't turn it off (because they don't realize they can, because the option to disable it is called "trackpad tuning").
I've been telling people in the reviews section to turn on trackpad tuning because I hope they can go on to enjoy the game. But if that crap was off by default, or if the option to disable it was at least labeled properly, I have no doubt this game would be getting a lot less hate.

[Magmarock]

Originally posted by bennett:

Yeah in my testing I determined that it is much easier to make very fine movements with a trackpad. Mouse users were getting hand cramp from trying to hold their hand very still, so I added an acceleration curve to make it less responsive to tiny movements on a mouse. It's fine if you prefer the trackpad tuning... nearly all my testers preferred the mouse tuning.

So it's not cheating to use it? Why not just call it acceleration. Makes me think it's only for trackpads

[buddy]

He called it that because he doesn't want you to use it, despite it being the least frustrating way to play the game.

[bennett]

It's recommended for trackpads. For a mouse I recommend the other way. But I didn't have 100% agreement among my testers so I made it an option.

[Magmarock]

Originally posted by buddy:

He called it that because he doesn't want you to use it, despite it being the least frustrating way to play the game.

I'd rather hear that from him directly.

[Magmarock]

Originally posted by bennett:

It's recommended for trackpads. For a mouse I recommend the other way. But I didn't have 100% agreement among my testers so I made it an option.

Why not call it acceleration though. Id Buddy correct that it's intended to be a bit of a bait trick?

[bennett]

Everyone already has an opinion about mouse acceleration when it comes to pointing at things. But in Getting Over It you're not pointing at things, you're giving relative impulse to the hammer, so it's not the same metaphor and the same assumptions don't apply.

I did a bunch of user testing and research to figure out what would be better for most users on trackpad or mouse, and I have to condense all of that down into a menu option so people can have a good experience. What I found is that:
- most players use mouse (not a huge surprise)
- most players disable mouse acceleration for pointing games (again not a huge surprise - acceleration is annoying for pointing use)
- most players who use a mouse complain of hand cramps in Getting Over It unless acceleration is enabled.
- players generally don't want to waste time reading explanations like this one, and most will just skip over long explanatory text (I do this myself). So I need to get the idea across in one or two words.

In this situation as a designer I have to try to make sure that people are having fun and not getting hand cramp, so I need to be a little directive in how I name this setting. I could have called trackpad mode 'hand-cramp mode', but then nobody who was using a trackpad would pick it. But if I called it 'acceleration mode' then nobody ever would have picked it, mouse or trackpad.

I could have just not made it a user-accessible setting, and tried to detect if you were using a mouse or a trackpad. But actually regardless of what buddy says above, I want you to be able to play how you prefer. But there's no neutral naming here - whatever I named it would have effects on what people chose. Hence, 'trackpad mode' was what I settled on. It's not perfect, for sure - game design is full of weird tradeoffs like this.

/edit to add: I think probably most hardcore players and speedrunners prefer a pure linear response, even in this game, and it's not super surprising if they don't get hand cramp. But remember that those players are in a tiny minority. If I count pirates, there are by now about 30 million players of this game, and according to my analytics, most never get to the point where they're running the game for a second time. Only about 5% can finish the game at all. So what seems really obvious to you as a pro might be different for a newbie.

[Stexe]

Originally posted by bennett:

Everyone already has an opinion about mouse acceleration when it comes to pointing at things. But in Getting Over It you're not pointing at things, you're giving relative impulse to the hammer, so it's not the same metaphor and the same assumptions don't apply.

I did a bunch of user testing and research to figure out what would be better for most users on trackpad or mouse, and I have to condense all of that down into a menu option so people can have a good experience. What I found is that:
- most players use mouse (not a huge surprise)
- most players disable mouse acceleration for pointing games (again not a huge surprise - acceleration is annoying for pointing use)
- most players who use a mouse complain of hand cramps in Getting Over It unless acceleration is enabled.
- players generally don't want to waste time reading explanations like this one, and most will just skip over long explanatory text (I do this myself). So I need to get the idea across in one or two words.

In this situation as a designer I have to try to make sure that people are having fun and not getting hand cramp, so I need to be a little directive in how I name this setting. I could have called trackpad mode 'hand-cramp mode', but then nobody who was using a trackpad would pick it. But if I called it 'acceleration mode' then nobody ever would have picked it, mouse or trackpad.

I could have just not made it a user-accessible setting, and tried to detect if you were using a mouse or a trackpad. But actually regardless of what buddy says above, I want you to be able to play how you prefer. But there's no neutral naming here - whatever I named it would have effects on what people chose. Hence, 'trackpad mode' was what I settled on. It's not perfect, for sure - game design is full of weird tradeoffs like this.

/edit to add: I think probably most hardcore players and speedrunners prefer a pure linear response, even in this game, and it's not super surprising if they don't get hand cramp. But remember that those players are in a tiny minority. If I count pirates, there are by now about 30 million players of this game, and according to my analytics, most never get to the point where they're running the game for a second time. Only about 5% can finish the game at all. So what seems really obvious to you as a pro might be different for a newbie.

Thanks for the detailed response. Great feedback and insight. Love things like this as a game developer myself.

Hope I can pick your brain about it someday at GDC. We chatted at the GitHub party ~2 years ago about Multibowl. Lots of fun times. =)

[Frosty]

The bottom line is that the movement in this has been coded to be non-linear, even if you turn the wrongly named "track pad" option off (which just about every PC gamer on earth knows as "acceleration") there is still extremely non-linear input.

You can see this most notably when the hammer is pointed straight down and you're trying to lower yourself vertically straight down to rest. You can move the mouse down, down, down, down, and it will barely move the character down at all. yet you make the tiniest minuscule movement to the left or the right and the character swings wildly to the left or right.

If I sit in windows desktop and move my mouse up and down I can see my cursor on screen moves up and down by very large amounts vertically with very tiny deviations in the horizontal axis, almost unnoticeable. Yet this movement in game translates into literally the opposite, you'll move the mouse up/down and get almost no vertical movement but you'll get cartoon-like exaggerated horizontal movement for the smallest deviations.

If I move my mouse down in a game I want the character to move down, this ought to be a basic prerequisite, that the game respect the players input in its raw form and doesn't make really odd translations to it in order to make it harder. In the development world this is known as artificial difficulty and is the hallmark of very bad game design.

[Gargaduk]

Originally posted by bennett:

Everyone already has an opinion about mouse acceleration when it comes to pointing at things. But in Getting Over It you're not pointing at things, you're giving relative impulse to the hammer, so it's not the same metaphor and the same assumptions don't apply.

I did a bunch of user testing and research to figure out what would be better for most users on trackpad or mouse, and I have to condense all of that down into a menu option so people can have a good experience. What I found is that:
- most players use mouse (not a huge surprise)
- most players disable mouse acceleration for pointing games (again not a huge surprise - acceleration is annoying for pointing use)
- most players who use a mouse complain of hand cramps in Getting Over It unless acceleration is enabled.
- players generally don't want to waste time reading explanations like this one, and most will just skip over long explanatory text (I do this myself). So I need to get the idea across in one or two words.

In this situation as a designer I have to try to make sure that people are having fun and not getting hand cramp, so I need to be a little directive in how I name this setting. I could have called trackpad mode 'hand-cramp mode', but then nobody who was using a trackpad would pick it. But if I called it 'acceleration mode' then nobody ever would have picked it, mouse or trackpad.

I could have just not made it a user-accessible setting, and tried to detect if you were using a mouse or a trackpad. But actually regardless of what buddy says above, I want you to be able to play how you prefer. But there's no neutral naming here - whatever I named it would have effects on what people chose. Hence, 'trackpad mode' was what I settled on. It's not perfect, for sure - game design is full of weird tradeoffs like this.

/edit to add: I think probably most hardcore players and speedrunners prefer a pure linear response, even in this game, and it's not super surprising if they don't get hand cramp. But remember that those players are in a tiny minority. If I count pirates, there are by now about 30 million players of this game, and according to my analytics, most never get to the point where they're running the game for a second time. Only about 5% can finish the game at all. So what seems really obvious to you as a pro might be different for a newbie.

Actually, I disagree with this a lot. I have now played this game in short bursts over the last 4 or 5 years. Always, always I ended up using the trackpad setting. But until now I had no idea why. It seemed really odd to me that something called "trackpad setting" would feel so much more direct, fast and responsive to me, who's using a mouse.
Now that I read the explanation that it's nothing else than mouse acceleration on / off I get it though.
Playing without acceleration is so much better. To a point where I can't even fathom now how someone could play with the acceleration (= not trackpad mode). Your character moves really slowly and you can't do what you want to do at all. It's basically unplayable. All I could do is uncomfortably and slowly crawl around, but if I had to do jumps and quick movements, it would end.

So with your point of "there's no neutral naming here" I also disagree! "Mouse acceleration on / off", this would be the neutral one!

And you say as a Game Designer your highest goal is for people to have fun, I very much agree with that! But I can't even think about how many people must have missed the fun in this game, or refunded, because they thought the controls were really odd, and all they'd have to do was turn off this setting.
I think it wasn't really about the decision whether to call this "mouse acceleration", "hand-cramp mode" or "trackpad mode". Any of those would've been fine, if there would at least have been some small additional info or introduction. A small text of "this turns off mouse acceleration" below the "trackpad mode" text. A little prompt when you start the game for the first time, where you can choose the mode and a small explanation what it does. Something like that.
The option just being called "trackpad mode"... that is *so* colored. It gets totally overlooked by mouse users because you'd really think it's just something specific for trackpads. While it has nothing to do with trackpads at all.
I believe you did tests and all, but I can't think they are really representative. Did the testers play more than 5-10 minutes? And did they switch back to the other option to try again after getting used to the game a bit?

Sorry for this big rant, I just had to get it out. It's not even about me after all, I found out quickly which option I prefer and am happy with it. But I see so many people hating this game and giving up fast. SO many more people could've liked and played this if "trackpad mode" was on by default or if it had a different name.