Ya I got it mixed up with the delay in the switching. I think the switching delay just increases friction for the player and it's not obvious in the game that the delay is there on purpose. I've been thinking and I think the reason why I as the player don't get that feeling of "will I have the opportunity to react to something in time" is because I see projectiles, and only projectiles that I know can hurt me. Perhaps there needs to be an indicator like a cooldown timer on the turrets alongside a cooldown timer on the player for their element switching with the same design, so I can make the connection that the timing has to be done carefully for specific turrets. I for one didn't really differentiate the "slow attacking turrets you can walk through" from the "fast attack turrets that are effectively lasers", perhaps they should have a completely different design. In Portal, there's those emitters that shot balls which are slow and you know you can dodge them, and lasers which block a line of path which you obviously don't want to attempt to dodge.
Anyways Im just throwing ideas at this point, I just sensed that lack of clarity as I played more.
Viewing post in Sennestin [Gamejam demo] jam comments
A cooldown on turrets would not make much sense as you can just look at the turrets when you first enter the room, you can see how fast each is shooting and how fast the bullets are, they are all very predictable, so a timer on that would be completely redundant and just be unnecessary clutter, how do you imagine all those UI elements would look when there would be multiple turrets next to one another. I don't really understand your point about being able to only see bullets that are about to hit you i'm assuming? All the turrets shoot in the exact same pattern that they start at and they can only go in a straight line. Similar to when you walk into a room you look at all the elements of a puzzle the same way you can look at all the lines of fire and their properties. It is up to the player to discover their own limits of what they can do with the tools they were given, with the level design giving opportunites for the player to do so. As for the delay in switching, when the player first gets the Philosopher's stone, they're immediately faced with a green turret that they have to get past using the stone. It was a green turret on purpose, as it being green forces the player to cycle through the elements at least twice and discover that there is a delay when switching. Same with the room afterwards there are green floor traps where the player has a chance to make that connection again. The same way there is weight and delay to pushing blocks, the Philosopher's stone shares that same property and is not unprecedented. I don't think it's a great idea to design mechanics around the player immediately doubting the way they are being used. All of the puzzles are designed around the delay and are completable as such, so i don't think there is much I can do about a player coming to a conclusion that something is an oversight before trying to think of ways that it might be intended. If there was no delay, I'd argue it would have much bigger consequences on clarity, as a player who sees that they can at any moment protect themselves from any element, might try to brute force puzzles that had more moving parts than using purely reactionary gameplay.