52. A New(?) Interaction

So, after much deliberation and gnashing of teeth, I have finally begun…

…to write a new devlog post…

I kid I kid.

I’ve finally begun overhauling the way in which the player interacts with panels…to be the way it was when I first started building the game.

The visuals are a bit WIP, but I do think I want to adopt the look of the walkaround panels for these starting tiles, as they will mostly function the same way. The player has to stand on them to see the puzzle or interact with the starting tile, and clicking the starting tile or pressing the spacebar will depress it. Depressing the tile, in this case, submits the current state of the panel for solution checking.

Way back in 2015 when I first started working on Taiji, in order to create a simpler interface for interaction, I adopted a modal system wherein the player would walk up to a tile in front of each puzzle and press a button in order to be put into “puzzle mode”. In puzzle mode, their normal walking controls would instead move around a cursor on the panel (ala Tetris Attack, Lumines, and many action puzzle games).

Obviously I’m joking somewhat about the new system being exactly the same, but it is an interesting case where I believe when I changed the panel interaction to be free cursor based, with a secondary input controlling the cursor. I may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater somewhat. At least part of the baby.

See, the main benefit I can get by moving back to this “starting tile” approach, is that I can fit way more panels in a small world area. Panels that would have otherwise physically overlapped, can now be made to be only visible when the player is standing on their starting tile.

Obviously, this was not present in the first version of the panel system, and was instead sort of a “worst of both worlds” approach where the panels had to take up a large amount of world space, and the player couldn’t interact with them unless they navigated their avatar to the starting tile. (To add additional insult to injury, I had separate buttons for entering and exiting a puzzle, and exiting a puzzle before solving would reset the panel.

A second benefit I get with this change is that I can prevent accidental solutions by requiring the player to manually submit the current state for checking. Previously, the solution was checked each and every time the player toggled a tile. Because the player will most likely only press the “check solution” button when they think they might have solved the panel, the player and game will only ever be out of sync when the player was actually wrong. No more situations where you’re reasoning your way towards something, only to be interrupted partway through by the sound of the panel being solved.

As a final bonus, which I’m sure no one will care about, it makes the player avatar a bit more important in general navigation and puzzle solving. This fact may or may not be utilized later…