everyone — including me — thought the solution to the platform behavior ambiguity was to change the design of the platforms. but i couldn't figure out a satisfying way to do this because ⓐ the platforms are already very abstract and adding any kind of concrete detail like gears or lights clashed with that kinda badly, and ⓑ many of the platforms are relatively short (as seen above) and just don't have space to put extra details
so i dusted off an old idea i never quite implemented, and lo and behold, problem solved... by changing the design of the controlling gizmo. this red wheel can be adjusted left or right by the player to move (otherwise-stationary) platforms along their track to any desired position. (and of course in principle it could adjust anything else that can be framed as a linear slider.)
this is great for all kinds of reasons
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it extremely fits the aesthetic. i mean it's a big red valve wheel
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it feels like a completely different kind of thing, even though under the hood it's very similar, which injects some variety, which is the whole theme of the game really
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i think shifting the question from "how the platform responds" to "what the control does" is much more intuitive, because the control is the thing you're actually interacting with. i mean you already have to remember the control → platform mapping, which is like "this control affects platform X". if i'd redesigned the platforms then that would become "this control affects platform X, which does Y", where you can derive Y from X, but only after you've remembered what X is in the first place. so there's an extra step for something that i'm supposed to be telling you for free?
but by redesigning the control, you already know what will happen, and only have to remember which thing it will happen to. which is also somewhat easier now — if something's already in motion, it's probably not controlled by a wheel.
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it's also delightful just how easy this was. i spent longer drawing the wheel — which is a red circle — than making it work. the effort i put into the platform code earlier meant it was trivial to plug the wheel into platforms with only minimal changes, and even giving the player these alternate controls was easy thanks to a bunch of work i put into player locking at the beginning of the year
i touched up my intro platform level using the wheel, and ash played through it last night. they commented on how different it felt (and how distinct the platforms felt), which is amazing to me because i ended up barely having to change anything. sick.