Crouch causes pains in any game designer’s ass.
It may very well be that you have no idea what I am talking about because the crouch has never been a problem for you. Up until a few years ago I would not have understood the problem either. It’s a crouch. You press a button and the hero crouches. You press it again and they stand up. The end. Simple.
The truth is that an insane number of people:
- Presses Crouch button accidentally;
- And then they have no idea they are in crouch.
I have seen professional game developers reporting a bug that “character started walking very slowly” – just because they pressed the crouch button accidentally.
Some games deal with it by displaying a crouch icon (in this case, see the triangle icon to the left)…
…but that’s what I call “powdering a pimple”, a crutch, not a real solution. And useless for games with no HUD anyway. Other games make you move really slowly when in crouch, with head swinging left and right like you’re drunk. But that also is often considered …a bug, not a feature.
We have the crouch option in our game, but I have not used it once. If I want a closer look I just use Zoom. So we arrived at the point where we are actually considering removing crouch from the game.
We know it’s the right thing to do, but we also know that players want to have it …just because. Don’t get me started on the troubles we got ourselves into by not including jump in Bulletstorm…
What do you think?