As mentioned earlier, I'm really concerned by the fact that by default screens in this kind of game don't have enough responsivity to them.

The latest attempt to respond to this is probably the most brute force - adding objects which change state if the character gets too close to them.

Alternate version of this discussion on Patreon

Why this was kind of a bad approach at first

The bigest issue with this approach is that things still feel janky when you have just one item responding to the character's existance - having one thing quickly change state at a very specific moment doesn't do a lot to make things feel consistently responsive.

To get around this I've taken three paths.

Quantity over quality

Having lots of small, reactive objects (the plants in the attached video) is better than having one big, reactive object. It means that instead of seeing the level react to you just once you get a constant drip feed of small responses, letting you know that your character is a part of the game world and not just a ghost floating through it.

The problem is that it takes a lot of drawing to add so many items. I've compromised by having about 25 short animations of tiny flowers opening and closing, each taking a few minutes to draw. To stretch them out further I've copied them facing different directions to give even more illusion of variety.

This is still more work than I'd like so in future screens I'll look at trimming the number of unique objects down even further!

Randomisation

Another problem I had was that if you're doing a naïve implementation of objects that react when you're, say, 100px away, you get a constant and artificial looking mushroom ring of activity around the character.

Breaking this up was actually really easy - just add a random element to each interaction so instead of waiting for you to get within 100px, it's 100px plus or minus 30px or so. That way there's still a definite correlation between your movement and the environment, but it feels much more natural.

Smoothness

You don't want to simply be flicking a switch when an object changes its state. The brute force fix here is to just add transition animations. I compromised between work and results by adding an extra 5 frames per animation to smooth the difference between 'active' and 'inactive' states.

This is still way more work than I'd like so I'll see if I can get away with 3 or fewer frames next time.

Why this is still kind of a bad approach

As the above video shows, this looks... fine? I guess?  But it's a lot of extra effort for something that still looks pretty janky.

I'll proably include some version of this on a few more screens for the sake of variety, but it wouldn't be my first choice for adding appeal to levels - the work to reward ratio is too low!

Although I do at least now have a theme of plants disliking the player character which can be developed some more in the main plot!