iamerror wrote:With respect to the direction facing: one of the obstacles I've created for myself is that the grid is hexagonal, so I need to support 6 directions. The d-pad is great for 4 or 8 directions. That's why I stuck with the clock - counter clock controls up till now. But I will take rainwarrior's suggestion and see how it works.
Ah! You know, I actually didn't read it as hex. I can see now that you've put 3-corner markings to kind of indicate this, but I think just the straight diagonal lines of the map itself suggested to me that it was just a 3/4 perspective square grid. Visually these two systems would put their cells in the same place, but of course hex has 6 connections instead of 4, and now I understand why it's a control design problem with the d-pad.
The controls I suggested strongly de-emphasize that vertical connection. I can see why that's not desirable.
I suppose an analog control might be ideal, but since that's not available maybe another alternative: give the user a cursor that they directly move in screen space (starting from centre of the cell to move from?), and the current selected tile is just whatever is currently under the cursor. That would probably also work for facing too.
I'm trying to think of any games I know of with a d-pad + hex grid, but can't think of many. (Mouse control comes much more readily to mind for hex games.) Nobunaga's ambition did it like your first version, staggering when moving left to right. There's Godzilla, where left and right are do-nothing leaving only 6 directions; I don't really like how that feels, personally, but it's at least another option. There's another called Conflict where you select a unit with the "cursor" idea, but then moving the unit becomes a rotary control + chosing to advance.
As far as visually understanding the hex grid nature, I see that you list the cell distance in the corner, which is useful now that I'm looking for it. Maybe some way of highlighting the current path directly on the playfield could help too? Hard to think of things that would work well on the NES, but for example you could have a coloured hex-shaped sprite that animates along the current path? If you drew that sprite last (i.e. under everything else) and only one tile per frame it would be like a flicker-transparency. Could even change the colour of the sprite where the path breaks from walk to run, but of course having enough palette space is always a problem on the NES.