Playtesting, Levels, and Wires!

And to the 3rd (I realize now its the 4th xd) devlog! This covers about a week of "progress". The pace quickly slowed down and from here I took time with everything and only made 1 small change/feature each day.

The first feature I made was wiring, trying to combat the unintuituve and complex parts of the game, and insted allowing you to override how things fire.

And here's a little gif demo of wires being used. Later I make them go green when storing a signal.

Bins, and pushers both emit signals, and everything else can be triggered only by that signal when connected to a wire.

The next big thing the game needed for me to test the concept on playtesters was a tutorial. I made a little mockup like this, also implementing levels with goals.Each level would have a title and a shape you need to deliver to the flag:

The next feature is a panel to show the keyboard shortcuts. Here is my code for that if anyone's curious I can explain it!

And here it is! (With an extra added panel and label for the title)

Next is a copy and move tool, with  support for flipping horizontally and vertically. This helps alot because players tend to build the solution away from the flag and then move it closer.

And now to fix the joiner placement and prevent placing one side seperately, I write this massive function to replace each call to set a tile on the machine.

And now, I finally playtest the tutorial, and realize, its absolutely dreadfull, with players  attempting very challenging puzzles, with little to no understanding of the mechanics.

I now rethink the tutorial, and add tooltips to each level, whilst slowly introducing the mechanics this time.

Another big change is limiting the UI, and only adding, for example, the button to place an arm, once you get to the level that introduces it.

Quick expieriment with flashes to help see what happens(they don't help xd)

Now with more tooltips than this: (they work nicely)

With very limited motivation, I decide to muck about with crt filters, although this is all I can show to avoid spoiling solutions. I deicde to leave 

the filters out xd

I now quicky add some music, later realizing how terrible it is, and send a build to a few friends!

2/5 playtesters never fully understand the mechanics, one skipping over the tutorial, and both struggling heavily with the game.

Although, the other 3 really enjoy the game, making me think the concept has potential.

I found a great many bugs by letting them play, and many ways the game should work differently:

• Move tool can duplicate "illegal blocks" - flag, walls, etc
• Move tool doesnt work going from bottom right to top left - selection 2 blocks smaller than it should be
• An easy way to move things with counting, like a ruler/contrast options/using keys to move with move tool
• Blocks can be pushed past a flag or joiner before being joined/delivered, due to these updating after. can be fixed by making them only trigger when something gets pushed onto them
• Skipping a level shouldn't play the win noise, and the win noise needs changing
• A way to select wich order things happen in would be super useful, and in combination with wires, would fix all the issues with update order being unintuituve
• A better animation system with different curves would be good
• Moving something multiple blocks in one frame does multiple animations
• Also found that giving wires an input/output side was a great idea
• The group's colours change all the time, and the colours are too similar and include non-colourful colours
• Clear level button should be allowed earlier
• A transparent overlay of blocks that remains after the machine stops would be great, insted of playing through many times and memorising where everything gets to
• ctrl+x and ctrl+c to move and copy, and maybe drag to select
• Ontop made a player think it had to through the top, and generally wording needs to change
• Gifs showing how each mechanic works in more detail may be good, along with forcing you to go through tutorial/see tooltips
• A guided tutorial would help massively
• More points for faster solutions would be a good idea
• Some levels may be unnecesary
• Support for different resolutions

Another little thing I did was make a timelapse recorder: (this code still has 1 problem - png insted of jpeg in the ffmpeg command)

A little gif of my solution to one of the super hard puzzles! (this was made after I made better level making tools, allowing me to just draw the shape and add it!

PS: I would highly recommend against playing the game at this point.