lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox



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


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

You could also force a player to go through one lever that controls platform #1, then one lever that controls platform type #2, before the rest of the level to force people to learn that levers are ambiguous

I had a suggestion originally that was based on a misreading of the post, so, um, oops.

Anyway, is there any reason that the player would want to stop a moving platform, and can levers activate multiple platforms? If one lever controlled both a #1 and a #2, then stopping the #2 would bring the #1 back.

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.)

ah, here's the doom influence

...is all that my comment was going to be, but actually yeah this does make me think about doom switches that stay on after you press them vs. ones that immediately turn off, and what each type communicates to the player. as someone who has little experience with those games, i have to admit that they sometimes confuse me, but it might be worth using how switches are used in those games as an example?

My intuition is to make the platforms visually distinct, with maybe the direction-switching one have like ◀▶ arrows in red and blue that light up one or the other and pulse to show which is active (I don't know if the engine lets you rotate that to line up with the direction of the track segment it's on but that'd help). And the go-pause one could have a 🔁 or ⚙ that's lit-up-and-pulsing/spinning or dark-and-inert. So the direction-switching one that hit the end of a track would still be visually "active/trying to move in that direction" rather than "asleep/done".

Ooh, actually, are there cases where different kinds of platform can share the same track? Because if not you could convey it as the lever controlling the state of the track rather than the platform itself, and depict it as a moving/stopped belt for example.

i really don't want to have every level that introduces a mechanic [...] 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.

I think you should challenge this assumption. You've already had one playtester blaze through your puzzles, and they didn't seem to mind all that much. If players are revisiting a level to collect all the stuff they missed the first time, I don't think they'll care about having to solve a gated puzzle area again. This means it would be fine to start each level with a simple puzzle that introduces an important mechanic.

bear in mind, that one playtester blazed through a design without much gating. and also, i have to play my own levels dozens and dozens of times, and i know that "jump through these hoops to get to the real part of the level" is a particular thing that i start to resent real fast :S

but clearly i've swung the pendulum too far here and need to, at the very least, find a more middley middle ground. so i'm... thinking about it