I actually cracked open Unity and worked on the game project yesterday. My thinking was that I had some people who were interested in the game remark about wanting to test it, and I don’t really have a properly playable build of the game at the moment.
So, I opened it up and proceeded to work a bit more on the interface transition, although I am still not entirely sure what the final approach should be. I also found a few bugs and quirks along the way.
One bug was due to the way in which I was determining what tile the player was standing on. This was due to a decision, which seemed innocuous at the time, to test a rectangle instead of a single point. This normally causes no problems, but there are certain degenerate cases when the player walks across a field of tiles that the tile which is currently highlighted will sort of ping-pong back and forth between the tile below and also above the player. I am again, not entirely sure why this is the case, but switching the test to a point test seems to have resolved the issue, and feels much better from an interaction standpoint.
The other thing that I tried out, was adding some more feedback to the puzzles in the game in the form of audio. Thus far, playing the game has been entirely silent, and I started to wonder if some of the complaints about the feel of interacting with the panels in the game had to do with the fact that there was no audio feedback to what the player was doing. I unfortunately do not have a properly functioning version of the cursor interface to see if the audio feedback would be sufficient there. I sort of broke it when I implemented the direct interface. I was hoping to keep them side-by-side, but that was somewhat more challenging than it initially appeared it was going to be. I may still decide to re-implement a cursor just to see if it is better, but I’m not sure. Main priority is just to get the gameplay up and running again.
Taiji 