[SUGGESTION] Optional hints for levels

Colorful Arty · March 02, 2017, 04:47:56 PM

I think it could be interesting if a player got stuck on a level, that they could get a hint toward the solution. Not all levels would have this, but if a designer wanted to put hint(s) on their level, they could. The Professor Layton games do this, and it works very well. It could be as simple as pushing a hotkey to bring up a GUI which allows players to view one or more hints if available, otherwise the GUI could just display a "no hint on this level" message. Do other people think this is a good idea?

Nepster · March 02, 2017, 05:03:34 PM

This is actually an old idea. There is even code for a Hint object in NeoLemmix. But the main problem that got never really solved is: How do we display the hints while creating the least amount of friction? Spawning (non-modal) message boxes is a good solution for windowed mode, but less so for full-screen mode. Players will likely want to move around in the level while still having the hint visible, but moving around will hide the message boxes behind the game screen with no easy way to access it again (apart from tabbing to them).

Colorful Arty · March 02, 2017, 05:09:54 PM

Is it really that big of a deal to be able to move around while viewing the hint? I was thinking just pulling up a GUI similar to loading a replay or the replay editor.

Nepster · March 02, 2017, 05:27:12 PM

I agree that being able to move around is not a must-have, but rather a nice-to-have. But in case of more complex hints or descriptions of certain positions in large levels, it might be useful to be able to move around or even continue playing the level.

PS: My first comment was only meant to start a discussion on how to display hints in the best possible way. I did not want to say that hints are a bad idea in any way or impossible to add in full-screen mode.

Simon · March 02, 2017, 06:46:14 PM

Dialogs could be a temporary hack, they're easy to make in Delphi-land.

But in the long run, don't use dialogs for this. You show a modal box when your logic cannot continue before the user has answered the box. But Lemmings doesn't rely on the user reading hints. I'm looking forward to a less intrusive longterm design.

Classic rant on dialogs on Coding Horror, with alternative ideas

-- Simon

mobius · March 03, 2017, 12:20:11 AM

I really like the idea and frankly don't care how it's implemented. Cheapo did it well, why can't we do it like that?

that is; I think a hot key made them appear and it was just text overlaid on the game screen in the top left or right corner.

ccexplore · March 03, 2017, 12:33:53 AM

Quote from: möbius on March 03, 2017, 12:20:11 AMI really like the idea and frankly don't care how it's implemented.

Of course you don't care how it's implemented since you aren't the one implementing it.

That being said, I am curious how easy or difficult do we (ie. namida or Nepster) expect implementing overlaid text in NeoLemmix to be? It is indeed the same method use in both Cheapo and Lix, so there's a sort of nice consistency to that method I guess.

IchoTolot · March 03, 2017, 12:47:30 AM

If this is going to be a thing I want be assured that these won't get annoying in any way.

I don't care for hints, I don't want hints when I'm solving levels, so I don't want them beeing displayed easily by some accident and ruin my experience. I want to solve the stuff on my own and not by cheating myself hints at the solution. So as long as these hints don't ever come upon my eyes I'm ok with them. Make them hidden behind sth, but keep them away from the users eyes who don't wanna see them at all!

It should also be obvious by now that I won't bother writing hints for my packs in any way, so you either have to step up your solving game or jump right into the next level and skip that one.

Proxima · March 03, 2017, 12:50:56 AM

Well, you could just customise your hotkeys so that "show hint" isn't assigned to anything.

exit · March 03, 2017, 02:45:48 AM

I agree with Icho. Lemmings isn't really a game for hints, but rather for experimenting with the various skills in different ways to find the solution, and using hints would ruin the whole experience of playing the game.

Having easy access to hints, and even just having hints at all, will encourage players to take the easy way out of solving a level: not having to work for the solution. In the extreme, this could lead to lazy players and diminishing interest in the game because such players will get accustomed to using hints to solve levels and will skip those levels which require thinking and effort. Additionally, players experimenting with levels leads to the discovery of bugs, new tricks, etc., meaning that the amount of those things found will decrease if usage of hints comes into being and increases.

If you really want to have hints for a level pack, including a text document with the download shouldn't be that much trouble, especially for namida and Nepster because they won't have to include a hint feature.

I feel that a text document is a better way of giving the player hints as it isn't readily available and requires that the player does more than just press a key, mitigating the possible negative effects aforementioned.

Personally, I won't use hints if they are added. If I really want to know the solution to the level, I'll just find a replay or check youtube.

namida · March 03, 2017, 08:24:59 AM

I would quite like to be able to add hints to my levels. Those who prefer to solve without help will simply not view the hints. I myself would fall into this group when playing anyone else's pack, but from a level designer point of view, since I do often make fairly hard levels (even if not to quite the same extent as IchoTolot or Nepster), being able to include hints directly in the pack would be nice. Of course, it's also far from an essential feature - otherwise I would've added it to NeoLemmix a long time ago. (The hint object Nepster mentions actually was implemented originally for Cheapo compatibility, and just functioned as a "do nothing, be invisible" object in NeoLemmix.)

Nepster · March 03, 2017, 08:02:19 PM

Quote from: ccexplore on March 03, 2017, 12:33:53 AM
That being said, I am curious how easy or difficult do we (ie. namida or Nepster) expect implementing overlaid text in NeoLemmix to be? It is indeed the same method use in both Cheapo and Lix, so there's a sort of nice consistency to that method I guess.

It depends a bit on where and how exactly to draw the text. I suspect that the purple lemmings font will turn out to be a bit too large for hint texts, but fortunately Delphi seems to provide the built-in method TBitmap.Canvas.TextOut to draw text (of one of the standard fonts) onto a bitmap. I haven't tested it yet, so it might be that this only got added to a newer version of Delphi.
So writing text on the level area will (hopefully) be as simple as adding a few lines at the end of the rendering code. I haven't looked in detail at the new skill bar code, so adding text there might be a bit more difficult.

As we now have a more modular skill bar, I wonder whether we could remove the mimimap (and some of the non-essential buttons) and display hint messages there, whenever the player asks for it?

Gronkling · March 03, 2017, 08:08:33 PM

If you want to overlay text, use white (or another bright colour) text with a black outline. This colouring for text can be read over anything.
(I wouldn't write or want to read hints)

Nepster · March 03, 2017, 08:11:46 PM

Good idea, but this might be a lot more difficult to implement. As far as I know TBitmap.Canvas.TextOut supports only uniformily coloured text.

Simon · March 03, 2017, 09:11:03 PM

Workaround: Print the text in black at several different positions, then, over that, print once in white at the center.

I haven't implemented hints in D Lix yet, I probably won't have them there at all. They feel unnatural to me. I can't explain it well right now, I haven't thought about it much.

-- Simon