I didn't think the "chink" text looked too bad. Maybe if text vfx were implemented, there could be an option to either have them turned off (default), turned on on their own, or turned on with symbol vfx
Text, symbols or none could work, this is a good idea. Of course, it would always be possible to swap out the graphics for whatever you like anyway, but maybe this is one to support at base level for accessibility reasons. It should only be a small handful of files anyway.
That idea for off-screen vfx to the left and right of the screen is fab! Could be very useful for sound-off/hard-of-hearing situations, The only thing that could be an issue is the vfx obscuring what is occurring on the viewable screen area.
Definitely worth considering, particularly if it ends up being very difficult (or, not at all possible) for the game to "know" whether something is happening "off-screen", or to draw graphics to an overlaid layer (which doesn't currently exist, and would eat up rendering resources).
Perhaps the hints could be displayed at the top of the game window, in the centre, with an arrow pointing left and right, something like this:
Or, more preferable, we could even use the panel display (this is coming in handy for a lot of things recently!):
Obviously, this would temporarily obscure the display, but the likelihood is that whatever is happening to prompts the hint is more important anyway, and we can always make them clickable-to-stop-showing.
In fact, one very large benefit to using the panel is that we wouldn't need another rendering layer; this might end up being the way to go with it.
It might be pretty cool too if, for the builder vfx, if three bars would appear when three bricks remain, two bars, when two, one when one, then the exclamation mark when the builder is about to give up and walk on.
I like the idea, but let's keep it simple to begin with (i.e. the same graphic each time) and see how necessary this is.
Is there really any point in a "Let's Go" vfx? ... Still, if it's optional and not too difficult to implement alongside other vfx, then why not, I guess.
The only two that I would consider necessary from an accessibility point of view are the Builder/Stacker/Platformer alert, and a lemming death that might have happened off-screen. All others are purely cosmetic. At some point I'll get a list together of the various sound cues that might need Visual SFX and we can decide what to do about each.
Does having the visual element as well make the timing process much more difficult, then?
Not really, it's essentially the same process of passing a message
per-lemming to cue the graphic. I understand a bit better now how things work than when I first attempted to implement this, so my next attempt should be more successful.
In fact, in order to bring this feature closer to something that feels manageable, I'll go ahead and make the call that
off-screen hints will be shown in the panel area. This will greatly simplify the feature; we already have code to get the Lemming's position, and we already have code to draw a message to the panel.
