Part 1
This is the first part of the series I will be posting in a monthly format.
The idea
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I got the idea, but it was during the time I was heavily invested in skateboarding. It was probably around 2010, when I had my fair share of playtime too with skate games such as Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Thrasher, and Skate. Even though they were fun to play with they left me feeling incomplete. Skating was so much more complex and these games just couldn’t replicate the experience. The way the tricks had to be executed was nothing close to their real-life counterparts. I knew there had to be a better method. During that time I also played with fingerboards a lot – Tiny boards that can be manipulated like skateboards but with the fingers instead of the feet. Since modern-day gamepads have 2 analog thumbsticks it wasn’t too hard for me to make the connection: How awesome would it be to control the skater’s legs in the game with the 2 sticks separately?
My train of thought didn’t just stop there. I soon realized that even though it could mimic skate movements better than one stick and buttons, the 2×2 analog axes that the sticks operated with were just not enough. Hmmm. Then how about if there was a way to measure how hard the sticks were pushed downward? The Sony PlayStation Dual Analog Controller came out in 1997 with dual thumbsticks they had a built-in digital button (L3,R3) that could be activated when the stick was pushed. But it was only a digital button that could signal only on or off states.
Then it hit me: What if the whole stick could be pushed down and pulled up? Another axis along the Z plane! Woah…I suddenly realized that this could be used for a whole lot more than just for skateboarding purposes.
After a handful of sketches, I had a rough rendering of my idea on paper. I imagined the sticks with soft silicon rings on top so the fingers could be secured to the sticks and be easily lifted or pushed down. Great! I was so happy and proud of myself I almost patted my own back. As I fiddled with an old Playstation controller, I closed my eyes and imagined it was my controller, and I envisioned all the great games that would be made for this. Sports games, fighting games, space simulator games…Niiceee…
Except for the fact that it dawned on me: If the thumbsticks would control the two limbs, what would control the character in the game? Ooooh! I had no answer for that. The initial euphoria was quickly washed off my face with a splash of reality. I still thought it was a neat idea, but hit a wall with this question.
The solution
Weeks or months had passed, and on a Sunday morning, I visited a local flea market. They usually have all sorts of games and toys from the past, G.I. JOEs, He-Man figures, old consoles, etc. I was strolling along the booths when all of a sudden, something unusual caught my attention. It was a gamepad, but it had a weird shape that I never saw before. It was the Microsoft Dualstrike controller. As I later found out, it was made in 1999 and it was a quirky and half-assed attempt to dethrone the mouse/keyboard inputs in favor of the gamepad. But my gosh was it a novel idea! The controller was split in half, connected by a joint in the middle that allowed it to rotate along the X and Y axes (pitch and roll) intended to replace mouse movement. It was a flop because it could not compete with the precision and speed of the mouse input. Nonetheless, I bought it right away, I knew it had potential in it – just not in its current form.
It came naturally to combine this center wrist control into my Z-axis controller concept. Well in theory at least.
Fast forward a few years. The controller idea never really vacated my mind, but I didn’t have the technological knowledge to pursue it. In 2018 I teamed up with my long-time friend Gyula, who I met through skateboarding. He became a mechanical engineer over the years so it was a perfect fit to form a startup and make this thing a reality with him. We applied for a state-funded venture capital investment and we secured a rather small fund.
Now with the finances sorted, we could finally go for it. We put together a crude proof of concept and hired a programmer to make a demo in Unreal Engine. It was a soccer game: a pair of stiff-as-a-board legs and a ball that could be kicked around on an endless field. Boy was it magic when we first tried our hands on the controller! Trying to force our hands and fingers to work in synchrony was hard but a lot of fun as well. After a few sessions, it was clear that the original idea that the wrist controls consist of 2 axes was not a good user experience.
Anyone who tested it instinctively tried to rotate it around the 3rd nonexistent Z axis (yaw) as well. The lack of this input axis was even more obvious within the game as the character movement could not pivot (rotate around the vertical axis). In traditional third-person view games, this is done subtly, one stick controls the forward-backward movement, and the other controls the camera view. As the two inputs are usually used simultaneously the rotation of the character is more achieved with the camera view input. I wrote in depth about this and the evolution of controls here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/robin-kosnas/?trackingId=Bl1YxV3fqpUqd8wbPghilA%3D%3D
We integrated the Z input on the sticks in a very crude way: small pressure sensors were positioned under thumbstick covers. This setup only had about a 2mm travel in the Vertical direction but it was enough to test the idea.
Even with this flaw the prototype or even pretotype we considered the test a success as a validation of the original concept.
We started to iterate the first real prototype soon afterward, but more on this in the next part.
Stay tuned…
