Slashcards: Learn Japanese! (other languages forthcoming) is a local co-op language-learning action game. This is a game that asks gamepad-using players to respond to free response language prompts (among other types of prompts) -- and that demands a faster input method then the onscreen keyboard you configure a PS4 with.This design blog follows part 1, an exploration of extant gamepad text input designs. I found that nothing out there’s appropriate for this game’s needs. One direction that interested me was dual stick keyboards, and a Google search revealed that Microsoft Research had done a relevant experiment elaborating on the standard hunt-and-peck onscreen gamepad keyboard.
Iteration 0: +Dual-stick, hunt-and-peck, divided keyboard
Dual stick input seemed a natural extension from single hunt-and-peck keyboard input, and I was glad that someone had given it a shot over the past thirty years. But I was disappointed to see that their results showed such a modest increase in input speed.
This design consists of dividing the keyboard in two and putting the cursors where your respective middle fingers would rest on the keyboard -- the left cursor defaulting to "d" and the right to "k".To type "q" would mean pressing left, left, up on the left stick and then a left shoulder button."m" would be down and then left on the right stick, and then pressing a right shoulder button.
Like the single-cursor, hunt-and-peck keyboard, cursor positions are persistent. So once the left cursor is on “q”, it takes seven inputs to type “b” (left-stick-right, right, down, right, right, down, left-shoulder.)
hIteration 1: +Elastic cursor
I played with having the cursor positions reset after an input. On the one hand, this behavior is less obvious than leaving the cursor where you left it. But in exchange for a slightly steeper learning curve, this choice provides the user with an opportunity to develop muscle memory for every letter."w" is then left-stick-up, left-stick-left, left-shoulder every time, regardless of the previous letter. After a few minutes of use, I could feel myself getting faster.But typing whole words still felt like a tedious amount of input. If every letter is two to five inputs, a five letter word ends up being around sixteen inputs.
When I tried mocking it up myself, I found that my own performance was a bit better than that of Microsoft Research's test group. But the hunt-and-peck approach with its concomitant repeated directional inputs -- even with the keyboard divided -- won't reliably work in any kind of time-constrained, action game context.
Iteration 2: +Free selection (non-hunt-and-peck)
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could choose a letter with a single stick-movement?Dispensing with the stateful cursor position, I yoked cursor position directly to the stick position.
Under this system, on the left stick, leaving the stick idle would select “d”, pressing all the way to the left would select “a”, pressing to the upper-right would select “t”.The cardinal directions and their diagonals are easy enough…
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...but that leaves the intermediate letters to be related to somewhat tricky intermediate positions.
Iteration 3: +Optimized free selection
The difficulty here can largely be addressed by optimizing the mapping between stick and virtual keyboard. The guiding principle is to give each option as much selection space as possible on the stick. When we map out the space on the stick that can be selected, we can see that the original, naive mapping is obviously, needlessly difficult:
And while it’s tempting to contrive a mapping where each option literally has equal area on this mapping, like so:
...it ignores obvious and massive optimizations the controller gives in context.For one, the neutral position needs zero area -- the stick reliably snaps back to (0.00, 0.00).The cardinal directions are also essentially a zero-thickness line, wherein each has a coordinate of 1.00 (east, or “f” on the left stick, always has x = 1.00.)
In practice, I found that the other coordinate of the cardinal directions was always very close to 0.00. Indeed, all the keys around the edge of the selection area (QWERT-G-BVCXZ-A, to go around clockwise) had a distance from the center that was reliably greater than 0.9.
Testing and experimentation gave me the final values I used to divide up the mapping, and the end result looks something like this:
The result is a massively improved input rate--provided the user is willing to put up with an initial learning curve of this new interaction. I encountered testers who, having spent countless hours hunting-and-pecking over Xbox Live and whatnot, were initially quite frustrated by this system. Even irritated, they were nevertheless actually typing faster than they had been.
Iteration 4: +Quadrants
Far and away the most common errors were in the corners, such as NNE and NE. My anecdotal suspicion is that gamers are used to gross input, be it little taps to line up sniper sights or the directional inputs for fighting game power-moves. Therefore I wanted to accommodate an input gesture less precise but more reliably repeatable.
My solution for this was to divide each split-keyboard half into quadrants.
The user would first choose a quadrant by pressing in one of the cardinal directions and then (optionally) turn to another direction to select the key within the quadrant.
Pressing right on the left stick would select the “FTGB” quadrant, and moving up would select “T”; moving down, “B”, pressing all the way to the right would select “G”, and a stick position not on the right edge of the joystick would be “F”.
Therefore typing “B” would reliably be one motion consisting of flicking the left stick right, then down. In practice, that basically feels like rubbing just below the center of the right side of the stick edge, and it’s endlessly reliably repeatable.
Fighting the quadrants can be frustrating, however. If you accidentally select the right quadrant and want to get down to the bottom, sliding down from the right edge won’t work; the stick needs to be relaxed, or the cursor needs to otherwise return to the center first. Therefore some users, whose grip on the gamepad sticks is lighter and more precise, will prefer iteration 3.
That said, my limited test group performed best on the quadrant keyboard. And here’s the split quadrant elastic dual stick on-screen keyboard (SQuEDSOSK) in context:
(You can see how I've taken steps to keep the on-screen keyboards from occluding too much -- more work to be done, there, to be sure.)
Try it out!
If you'd like to try Slashcards: Learn Japanese, you can give the pre-release preview a spin by downloading a build from the itch page.
Why stop at English? I'll be writing up part 3 shortly, where I'll talk about the development of the Japanese-specific kana keyboard.
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