Color Panel Puzzle - Simple Scripting and Thoughts.

One of the puzzles in the subLIMINAL is the color panel puzzle, or something that I refer as the Xylophone Puzzle.

The main idea of this puzzle was originally going to be a piano that had to be upscaled and then have certain notes played in order in order for the player to progress, however I retooled this idea into the current iteration for several reasons.

The original puzzle felt as it required a bit too much specialized knowledge in music theory so I decided to still use the concept but tweak it to it would be accessible to the layman. On recap this does bring in an issue that it causes the game to be inaccessible to color-blind people which is why I plan on adding an accessibility mode that will either make the panel's texture more distinctive or allow the player to skip the entire level.

So the way the puzzle works is adding a simple script dubbed the Color Counter at attach it to the player. The color panels strewn around the room have tags to the and the script will use colliders and to check the tag of the panel the player collided with and with assign the playerXyloCode string a letter that corresponds to the respective color. 

The panels can be upscaled and moved thus allowing the player to build their own Xylophone that needs to be played in a given order to progress. The ideal way of approaching this is to minimize and store away the needless keys such as while doing the first puzzle, as in the "RGRRRG" string, it would be ideal to simply use the red and green panels while putting away the other five ones. In addition there will be multiple color puzzles per level thus it would require the player to bring in these panels with them to progress through the place.

The script to memorize the order works in the following way. Once collision is detected from the default then it will replace the leftmost X with the letter that corresponds with the collider's tag. Upon the seventh collision and later it will also drop the first letter in addition to adding the collider's tag.

After the string is changed it will access the ColorBlocks function that will update the color blocks that are assigned to the player so they can keep track of their progress to see what they've touched.

In the back of the room you can see two rows of 6 panels. The above row is the player's input that will change as per the ColorBlocks functions, such as how my last six touches were orange, orange, yellow, yellow, blue, and red in the first picture. Meanwhile the bottom row is the code needed to progress the level. So in order to progress I would have store away the blue and indigo panels as they necessary while then touching the green, red, orange, yellow, violet, and again the red panel to progress.

After I did so, the blockade in the top left corner of the screen was removed.

Speaking of blockades...

The last element to this puzzle are the blockades. Each blockade will be seen near with a code, and in order to make them disappear it should be fairly obvious what the player must do.

In summary, this is basically a fairly simplistic puzzle that rather than using a fixed input manner it is up to the player to bring in the keys with them around the level by using their powers to manipulate objects within the level.