Improving user-friendliness

[niwhite]

It is clear the engine is amazing and can achieve exactly what we need to reproduce things we experienced in the original GS games.

However, when using the current implementation, there are some points that could be worked upon in order to increase user-friendliness. Following will be a list of the points I have experienced when working with the engine (in the windows app):

1. Creating Tile/Game events:

The required format for a tile or game event is JSON, however, in a stringified form such as:

"tile_event/jump":"{\n"type": "jump",\n"x": 52,\n"y": 30,\n"activation_directions": "right",\n"activation_collision_layers": 6\n}",<

While this is still a simple example with few keywords, this is already hard to read as human as well as hard to interprete for IDEs.

-> Current solution/workaround:

create a proper JSON object in your favorite IDE or even a json online viewer and copy paste the correct/proper JSON into Tiled.

-> Desired Solution:

It may be desirable to enable the engine to handle IDE interpretable JSONs. OR even better imo would be a tool that you can use to generate your tile/game events such that only copy pasting into Tiled is required (see png as example workflow):

This should ideally also help to create deeply nested JSONs as required for complex "cutscenes".

2. No Debugging:

When a tile/game event does not work (as in appear/happen) ingame, there is currently no way to tell what happened. The event simply won't be there. Would be nice to know whether this is due to:

• a typo
• a broken json
• a non-existant variable/"type"/keyword
• a broken logic
• missing (items/storage) db entries

-> Current solution/workaround:

None

-> Desired Solution:

Log [Already being worked upon to be implemented in the next release, AFAIK]

3. Few Psynergies (& interactable objects):

So far there are not many psynergies implemented. This only allows very few puzzles.
I think I can speak for everyone, that everyone loves psynergies and to discover new ones. As such, I came up with a few ideas for new psynergies that can be used for new puzzles. Those would then probably, in turn, require new interactable objects.
Sadly my typescript skills aren't as good as my python skills, so I dont know how to create my new psynergies or interactable objects.

-> Current solution/workaround:

Hoping @jjppof will help implement all these psynergies and ideas 😢

-> Desired Solution:

¯_(ツ)_/¯

4. Highlight Tiles with events in Tiled

Not really an engine thing but a Tiled thing. Would be nice to see tiles highlighted that contain a Tile event

5. Few Battle animations Npc sprites

Not really an engine thing but requires more additional effort (especially the animations)