Animation feedback on hitting correct moles, and incorrect moles

[lucasmnt]

Addition of two new animations :

• PopCorrectMole.anim => plays when you hit a correct mole
• PopWrongMole.anim => plays when you hit a distractor mole, or when a correct mole disappear via its timer

Modification of the diskMole prefab :

• Addition of a ImagePlaceholder game object
• Adding checkmark-correct and checkmark-wrong as child of ImagePlaceholder.

Modification of the diskMole.cs script to be able to play the new animations : not much has really changed in the code, beside some minor changes in the name of animations to play, depending on the mole state :

Here is an exemple of what PopCorrectMole.anim and PopWrongMole.anim will look like in-game :

[bastianilso]

Hi @lucasmnt !

• I like how the behavior looks and the general direction you ended up choosing.

• transitions and feedback duration are really well timed, good job 👍

• The "metaphor" you are in the sense relying on here is that the "mole turns into a checkmark or a cross if you hit the right or wrong one." But it looks odd that you can see some kind of remnants of mole behind it - it looks like it's 99% fully covered, but the last 1% makes it seem like you're not supposed to be able to see the mole behind it. Actually, here is an idea for a cleaner look:

  1. We separate the ✔❌ icons from color. The ✔❌ are overlaid on top of the moles.
  2. We can then apply the color change on the Mole itself, following a similar timing as the icon by controlling transition logic from Mole.cs itself. I think that in terms of visual look, this will result in something cleaner, than having "two circles on top of each other".

• I think it works OK that the checkmark state is green when it's for such a short time. But we should aim for a lighter type of green, try with the color: 96d47e.

[lucasmnt]

Hi @bastianilso,

I'm working on animation feedback, and I'm trying to get it work like you suggested, playing with the main texture of the mole and the color, but the only thing I manage to do right now is this :

On the other hand, i've modified the existing animation a bit, and re-scaled the checkmark/cross circles so we cannot see what is behind :

I feel that this is not much but still a little better :)

[bastianilso]

Thanks for your inline replies @lucasmnt, see my new comment and let me know when the branch is ready for final review.

[lucasmnt]

aaah, thanks this makes a lot of sense. I think your judgement was very good, I agree that giving some kind of indication for expired moles is a good idea, given that players were supposed to hit them. I I didnt consider this corner case from a design perspective, which I guess have several questions:

* should we use the same feedback as when people hit moles? will this cause people to interpret it as "hits" somehow? I hope not.

* is it weird if we show feedback in the mole expired case, but not in distractor expired case?

Regardless, I am fine with your current judgement of the behavioral design. But since the behavior does not read very easily from a technical perspective (just by looking at the if statement), please add an inline code comment describing that this adds the PopWrongMole animation to a Mole if it expires before players manage to hit it.

First, thank you for your feedback,

About your questions :

• I think that if we do more differents feedbacks it could be "dangerous" in a sense that it could get confusing for the patient as too many differents feedback will lead to too much information to retain and react to (and I assume we don't want that). I also want to add that our checkmark and cross images are generic enough to have multiple use cases, so people could register the feedback as "good behavior/bad behavior". I guess we will need some field testing to have the correct awnser or at least what is the closest to it :)
• I would say this is kind of the same awnser for this question, I don't think we want too many different feedbacks for the patient, and plus, for example, using "PopCorrectMole" for exipiring distractor moles feels a bit off. From a "gamer" perspective, since you are not earning "points" by avoiding distractors, I don't feel like it is important to show that you succesfully avoided it. I consider that having "PopWrongMole" showing when you hit a distractor will be enough.

I added some commentaries so now getting inside the code will be easier.

Also i modified the color to this green : 96d47e :

[lucasmnt]

I reverted changes of the main scene, and everything seems to work as intended. I'll see what I can do about about tabular/space changes !

[bastianilso]

@lucasmnt OK, sounds good. let me know when youre done and I will take a final look to see if we can land this.

[lucasmnt]

Well, I have not much to add, so I think it is good to merge, without the main scene. I went to my IDE settings, and I think it will not add spaces by itself.

[bastianilso]

OK great Lucas. Right now it looks like the branch consists of 5 commits, so maybe you can squash them into one, make sure the MainScene is not included in there and make sure the commit is rebased on top of the master branch.

[lucasmnt]

I had some troubles with rebasing the commits, but now it is done and normally it should work as usual

[lucasmnt]

Closing it for the moment.