Age of Anything

Devlog

Playing an RTS with a controller, then on a Steam Deck

I want to play this on my Steam Deck, so today was a clean pass over the controls for a controller.

You can’t just copy the mouse controls onto a pad, it doesn’t work. So there’s a reticle on the left stick that snaps to the unit near it. Tap A to select, double-tap for every unit of that kind on screen, or hold A and a circle grows and sweeps up your units as you move. X does the obvious thing, Y attack-moves, B backs out of anything, and the d-pad jumps to idle workers, your Town Center and two groups of soldiers.

Holding A on a frog worker: a circle grows on the ground around it

The order ring

Whatever you’ve selected, its buttons come up on a ring around it with their pictures and costs, and you pick with the stick. Building pages stay open, so a house is three presses.

The order ring open around the frogs' Town Center, the worker button pointed at and its card beside it

There’s a test that plays a real match with a fake pad too, so I’m not the one finding out the buttons broke.

On the Deck

The first build went on the Deck that same evening. My notes:

  • The UI wasn’t scaled for the small screen, the Start button was off the bottom.
  • Everything was flat colour and there was no sound at all. This was the funniest bug of the day. The export only packed the editor’s copies of the art and sound, not the files the game actually reads, and on the Mac nothing looked wrong. All 323 files get packed as they are now.
  • Holding a shoulder button and steering the ring with a stick was awkward. Now you just tap A on what you want to command and the ring opens, and the camera stays still.

Second build was much better. Selection worked really well, and it all works really nicely now.