Main Feedback (Spoilers yet again)

Here's a non-exhaustive list of all of the features I've talked to people about and what (if anything) was mentioned along with perhaps how I addressed it.

In alphabetical order.

Blocker:

Since this hasn't been used in a public build yet, I haven't got a lot of feedback, but someone suggested that I swap how the filter works, allowing things to pass only if they do not share a channel instead of only if they share a channel. I think this makes a lot more sense, as if the player does not emit green light, they cannot see the green barrier and hence pass through it.

Box:

Someone mentioned that my box sprite (based on a cube from portal) looked like a wall to them. I can see how this would happen, but I couldn't find a way to fix it. We went through some sprite change ideas together, such as adding a diagonal shadow or a similar drop to the button, but nothing felt right. The tricky thing is that the box can contain other items which need to be centred and square. This was also the element that made me push to implement the smoothing between game states. This makes it much easier to see that all of the boxes in a line move, rather than teleporting the first to the end (since the others appear to not have moved). Some people were surprised that they could push more than one box at a time, something that other games such as Sokoban do not allow. To reinforce this, "level4" forces you to learn this in a relatively small setting so you don't get lost later.

Button:

Initially people didn't like how the button looked when it was small, and it also made some levels annoying because they couldn't tell/remember there was a button under a box. I then made the button a bit bigger than one tile and removed it from the tile map. People noticed the layering issues now that the sprite is bigger, but I haven't resolved that yet.

Emitter / Receiver:

Quite a few iterations here. Initially emitters were nearly the same colour as the floor, and a single colour. People started saying it was hard to see which direction they were facing, which made sense. I added a stripe to the end with a slightly lighter shader to combat this, however it wasn't very effective. Eventually I realised why people were getting confused, the colour similarity to the floor. Originally, I made the colour distinct from the wall to make them easily spottable, however the important part of the emitter is the "barrel". Finally, I decided to swap the contrast with the receiver and make the emitter bright, making the spoke visible against the background. Then I changed the receivers to be square, further distinguishing them.

Entrance / Exit:

Level exits / goals have not changed at all, although someone suggested adding an animation. The level entrances haven't changed much, I just drew a couple of circles to almost invert the star shape of the exit initially. The only change I made was making the final circle on the edge only appear after a level is completed to show progress. Some people were annoyed about accidentally entering a level they had just completed by moving against the wall, so I changed up a lot of the logic to make that work, but then some people were annoyed (and though they had soft-locked, pressing space would work though) about not being able to go back immediately after crossing a level transition. Eventually I caved and added a special condition to allow both of these seemingly mutually exclusive features work. The actual meta-mechanics have changed a little, they can now be recoloured with photons now, for future levels. 

Filter:

Filters are not very useful; they are essentially an underpowered mirror. No one has mentioned them whatsoever since I changed their design after the first iteration. Originally, they were just a mirror that didn't reflect, meaning the direction was redundant. This however, lead to some interesting issues in rendering the half-coloured photons, so I switched them to dots.

Floor Tiles:

People did mention that the lava textures were a bit out-of-place among the tones used in the rest of the game. After a little thinking I decided to change them to water, still functions exactly the same though (the lily pads are really cute though imo :3). I then added a highlighted tile for indicating important spaces.

Mirrors:

Mirrors are perhaps the most complex elements, coming with a variety of variants (lol). In total there are 8: None (normal mirror), Subtractive (reflects the colour of the mirror), RGB/BGR shift (shifts the channels across one), half (reflects 50% of the photon, dividing it by 2), copy (duplicates the photon and reflects the copy), exact (only reflects the photon if it exactly matches the colour) and invert (reflects the inverse of the colour). Indicating the difference between these is very difficult and I anticipate making a lot of changes, but none have been made yet. 

Lens:

The lens is a new collectable item that has not been given feedback (perhaps since no one has seen it). So, not much to say here.

Levels:

The initial set of 4 levels was very basic, but I've kept them in the project because I liked them. They aren't playable and aren't included in the build, but they are there (just checked and they are very broken haha). Lots of the feedback has been about the levels being challenging and getting better later on. I am currently working on fixing up the difficulty curve on the early levels.

Notifications:

These little popup generators are new, just like lenses, however they were described as "helpful". Haven't changed anything since.

Photons:

Heaps of stuff going on here, just going to summarise the timeline. To start, photons just had a colour and a direction, but this looked very bad when being filtered and reflected. Eventually I realised I needed to split the photon into two parts, but instead of doing the smart thing and having two objects, I just have one with a texture that contains all permutations. It works, it just caused me more pain than I wanted. Now every photon has a beginning colour and end colour and can enable and disable both ends to make it look like it's getting filtered or reflected. The technical details are a lot more confusing, but that's the overall idea. This was also the source of the issue with filters being directional.

Player:

People did not like the 32x32 texture I started with in the concept art, understandably as I made everything else stick to 16x16. Instead of making everything else come up to 32x32, when I wasn't even happy with the player's sprite, I just redesigned the player as 16x16 without any animation. I did like these animations (probably because I made them), but they didn't actually contribute anything and just made the scene a little noisy when thinking through a puzzle. People generally liked both looks, and like the smoothing between states added later. This was also the sprite I discovered the compression issue from. 

Post Processing:

I started looking into more advanced post processing in the hope that it would simplify a lot of my shaders, since currently I have a shader running on everything in the scene individually, but I couldn't find a way to incorporate the extra channels without going in too deep (which I don't want to waste my time with when I have something that works). Instead, someone suggested creating a CRT like effect (after playing a game with a similar effect). I really liked this idea, as it made me want to add a tiny bit of chromatic aberration, something that perfectly fit my game. After releasing this to people, someone mentioned that it was making them feel "disorientated". Following this I have added an option in the new-and-improved (not really) settings menu to disable it.

Prisms:

The idea for prisms was what started this project, the idea that 45 degrees would allow for a nice prism split was appealing. I soon realised that mirrors were the far more foundational element as they preserve colours, but the idea stuck. Since I eventually moved to the 5-channel model, I was even more pleased when I came back to prisms with now a 5-way split for a full 180 spread. Not much has been said about prisms, apart from people taking a while to realise what the sprite was, but I can't think of a way to fix that in 1/8th of 16x16.

Wall Tiles:

Some people have said that the walls are unintuitive since the lie on the midpoint of each tile, and I do agree with this somewhat. The reason they are the way they are is because I wanted mirrors to be present on walls originally. The only way to get clean reflections using this system would be to have the mirrors in the middle of the tiles (like I have now). Because of this, I built the walls around having mirrors in them, in fact my sprite sheet still has these tiles present. A problem that was a big issue was single pixel gaps between tiles. This was pointed out by a couple of people, and eventually shown to occur when setting the browser zoom level to particular values that conflict with binary representation. I "fixed" this by adding padding around all of my tiles. As I was writing this, I found a property that looked like exactly what I wanted, letting me shift all the sprites by a fixed amount, I chose a value under one pixel, and everything looks great now! Now all the sprites round the same way, since they are slightly to one side of the line rather than just flipping between them "randomly". Doors have been the main issue in the walls department, with some people finding it hard to distinguish between open and closed doors, I may eventually address this, perhaps by flipping the contrast to match that of walls (I was trying to stay away from that to make it clear there is a door, but that may be a favourable compromise).  There are also issues with which rotation doors are in, as this is automatically determined by the tiles, but I design levels around this.

Volume:

I haven't gotten any volume complaints yet, but I added a volume slider, because I just know that someone will want it.