🍃Kasi and Akesi🍃

Refs for all three of my current characters~

I didn't do quiiite as well drawing Gelphox but oh well, who's keeping score

so i had a "moving platforms" level that i thought was pretty solid, and i sat ash down in front of it, and they made it to the exit but completely missed several key points of how moving platforms work. i'd assumed the player would fiddle with things a bit more but they just blazed right through

so a little rethinking is required.

part of the trouble i'm having is that fox flux levels are big romps with a bunch of small things to do within them. most modern indie puzzlers consist of a lot of very small quick independent puzzles, so if they want to teach the player something, they can just make a puzzle that forces the player to understand it before they continue. but i really don't want to have every level that introduces a mechanic (which is going to be a lot of them!) start with a tedious linear test for beginners that you have to pass before getting to anything else, because then it will feel incredibly dull to revisit a level looking for things you missed.

so i need to find ways to introduce new ideas that function as blockades if you don't have a firm grasp yet, but that are either completely trivial or a more interesting challenge once you do. i think the very first level is a good example: there are increasingly tall stacks of stone blocks to jump over, to ensure you have a sense of how jumping works. so a brand new player will probably run up to each one, stop, and do a jump. but if you're already familiar with platformer jumping then you'll naturally try to parkour over them without stopping instead, which is more interesting and doesn't get old easily.

but now i need to replicate that kind of experience, somehow, with levers that activate moving platforms. hm.

i also shot myself in the foot with a design problem here. see, levers can activate platforms, but it's up to the platform what that means. there are two main interpretations:

1. the platform stops at the ends of its track (if any), and the lever toggles between "forwards" and "reverse".

2. the platform loops back and forth along its track, and the lever toggles between "go" and "stop".

this introduces some ambiguity. i think i'm okay with that; ambiguity encourages the player to fiddle with things they encounter. (you already can't immediately tell what a lever controls without just flipping it, or tell where a platform will go without following it.)

but ash didn't pick up on this. i even had one of each platform right next to each other, and they assumed the one that stopped at the end was simply "done" and would never move again; they didn't try flipping the lever back.

i guess i have a few options here

1. remove the ambiguity: pick one platform mode and stick with it. this reduces puzzle design space, though. it's not even immediately obvious which one i'd go with.

2. remove the ambiguity: give the platform a different design if it behaves differently. this is a little tricky since i already have different platform designs based on what activates them in the first place. the platform designs are also kind of abstract

3. remove the ambiguity: give the platform a visual indication of what it is currently doing. i think this would make space for distinguishing "going forward, but ran out of space" from "deactivated"?

hmm i kind of like how that sounds, though i'm not sure what it would look like. it also leaves the door open for sneaky platforms that don't convey what they're doing, like i have one drawn already that's kind of wireframe so it wouldn't have a surface for this to appear on

Protogens: walled garden, hard to jailbreak, expensive official repairs, partially organic

Synths: sleek,
audio issues because insert linux audio joke , hot as fuck

the term you want to research is "steganography"

I think in the case of pico8 it actually just has a tiny slice of binary data represented as RGB pixels at the bottom maybe? or I may be wrong

If I remember correctly, spore stores all the fun details in its .pngs by encoding it in some form via the alpha channel which you can see if you open one up and mess with the transparency

or you can sort of see it in mangled form here via the time I uploaded a guy to Twitter and tweetdeck ate the transparency leaving the data sprinkles visible for all to see

like apparently you can put arbitrary metadata into a png file but maxis did it this way instead