I tried shrinking the lem sprite, but tbh because it's low-res it barely looks like a lemming
I didn't mean for you to narrow the
lemming.
I meant for you to narrow the
animation, which happens to contain a lemming. The animation is rectangular. While the lemming is standing still, the animation has entirely-black columns at its very left and at its very right. I meant for you to cut 1-2 of these columns on the left and 1-2 of these columns on the right.
The point of that is to reduce the time during which we see a walker walking forward at normal speed. The
walking walker is the distraction. With the narrower rectangle, the walking walker will reach the center sooner after his appearance, and he will disappear faster in the end.
OK, new version of the (de)neutralizer with a longer animation as suggested:
The big idea is that the content changes color while it's in the gadget, and yes, the animation shows that clearer now.
I'd even recommend to let the resulting lemming stay even longer before he leaves. Reason: That way, you will, in total, show more grey lemming (than blue lemming) on the make-grey gadget, and more blue lemming on the make-blue gadget.
Proxima's suggestion of a static icon with an arrow
Yes, also interesting. Does NL tileset design have a rule to animate everything that is not terrain? Hard to say what nondistracting animation to add here, then.
The biggest issue here is the horizontal arrow. With the walkers in the icon, the arrow hints at walk
direction. NL has those flipping gates that
also contain horizontal arrows, and there, the arrows indeed mean walk direction.
Separate small concern: The arrow also blends into the gadget's bar. Consider raising/lowering it by 1 pixel.
NL has too many gadgets anyway. It's beyond me why, for its final release, it gets even more of them (requiring us to design even more carefully against confusion) instead of fixing the newbie UX.
That is for what it wants to be known, for eternity? Well, let's still do the best we can for the neutralizer.
-- Simon