Developer Update: Full Gamepad Support Is Now Working

Hello everyone!

I recently finished implementing full gamepad support for Soccer Fan – Online Multiplayer Football.

When I started, I thought it would be a small task:

• Move the player using the left stick

• Assign passing, shooting and tackling to controller buttons

• Navigate menus using the D-pad

• Press the South button to select the highlighted option

It quickly became one of the most difficult systems I have worked on for the game.

Gameplay controls were only the beginning

Analog movement needed dead zones, camera-relative movement, smooth direction changes and support for actions that behave differently depending on whether the player has possession of the ball.

After plenty of testing, gameplay finally felt responsive.

Then the real problems started inside the menus.

The highlighted button was not always activated

At one point, the controller could visibly highlight the Play button, but pressing Select would open Settings or activate Back instead.

The problem was that multiple systems had different ideas about which UI element was selected:

• My custom gamepad navigation system

• Unity’s EventSystem

• An older UI navigation script

Even worse, more than one system was listening for the same Submit button. A single controller press could trigger two different actions.

Finding the cause

I added detailed logs showing:

• The visibly highlighted button

• My navigation system’s current target

• Unity’s selected object

• The object that actually received the Submit action

• The currently active UI panel or popup

The logs finally revealed that the highlighted button and Unity’s selected button were sometimes completely different.

The solution

I gave my custom navigation system full ownership of gamepad Submit while a menu is active.

It now:

1. Captures the currently highlighted UI element

2. Verifies that it is still valid and belongs to the active menu

3. Sends the action directly to that same element

4. Prevents competing systems from processing the same controller press

Gameplay input and menu input remain separate, and mouse support continues working normally.

What is working now

The game currently supports:

• Smooth analog player movement

• Controller-based passing, shooting and tackling

• D-pad and analog-stick menu navigation

• Buttons, sliders, dropdowns and scrollable menus

• Navigation inside layered panels and popups

• Mouse and controller input working together

• One controller press producing exactly one UI action

• The visibly highlighted element always receiving the action

What looked like a simple button-mapping task became a major lesson in debugging, architecture and input ownership. It was exhausting, but it is also one of the most valuable systems I have added to the game.

Question for players

Which controller do you normally use for PC games?

Also, when navigating menus, do you prefer:

A. D-pad
B. Left analog stick
C. Both

Your feedback will help me improve the controller experience before release.