Boulder and Material visibility

[8bitgentleman]

For a while we've been getting people who are confused about what can be interacted with and what can not be. A good example of this is the forest cave. Many players don't realize that you can attack the blocks there to gain passage to the cafe. To make this more obvious I've done 2 things:

1. I've added a black outline to the first block as well as several materials. I think it improves visibility if objects that can be interacted with are outlined in black. If people agree I can do this to all the materials.
2. I've decreased the hp of the forest blocks to 1 to make them easier to break through. This may help players who only attack them once and then get confused/frustrated.

[niamu]

I think decreasing the HP on the breakable blocks in the forest is a good idea. There's no reason to have them take more than 1 hit.

I'm alright with adding the black outline around materials as an interim fix for this issue, but after some more thought, I think we need to only ever put something in a level if it can be interacted with. If it can't be interacted with, it needs to be very subtle and blend with the background. A good example of something that blends pretty well into the background is the confederate flag in the forest levels.

Our long term goal should be that anything you see can be picked up or interacted with in some way. That would solve the problem in a way that mirrors the episode as well as meets play expectations.

Examples of where we do this poorly that I can think of off the top of my head is Taco Town where we have interactive bottles that can be picked up, but also bottles as part of scenery that can't be picked up. Also bones/skulls in the Valley that can and can't be interacted with.

We can solve this sort of consistency by combing through the levels we have now and removing the scenery elements that players can't touch, but mimic items that can be picked up.

[edisonout]

Adding black lines manually to everything seems like a lot of effort. If a thicker outline is the way we want to go, there has to be a way of doing it through code.

I agree with @niamu and think we should go through levels and remove things (like the stars on the gay island beach) that look like potential items but aren't.

A long time ago we separated out the attack and interact button and I'm still not sure all the players think to try both on anything they come across.

[8bitgentleman]

Pretty much all of the black outlines have already been added so the work is done there :P I have gone through the levels and removed random background/foreground elements. The levels look cleaner but also more sparse, especially Gay Island. I'm sure there's still a lot that can be done to tweak things for better understanding. @edisonout do you remember the reasoning behind the separation of attack and interact? Was it a "hug button" situation or was there confusion with attacking npcs or something?

[edisonout]

I think it was problems with things near doors and occidentally going through them rather than attacking something nearby. I don't have a problem with them remaining separate, just with people who don't think to try both when they see something and don't know what to do about it.

[8bitgentleman]

So this pull is already very large and I don't think anything else should be added to it.. I like the long term goals brought up by @niamu and @edisonout but they're out of the scope of this pull.

[niamu]

I'm less convinced that this is the proper way to solve this now. We're nearing the end of development for the LÖVE project now and I think most people have had their fill since he launch of v1.0.

I'm weary of modifying the image assets now as I prefer to keep them "pure" so that we can turn them into SVG data later that will scale very well and something that we can style with borders programatically.

I think this is definitely moving in the right direction with intent, but I feel like it's the wrong implementation.

[8bitgentleman]

That's fine. I do think the tileset and level changes are solid though.