I completely agree with your first point, I didn't know how to put it into words but you did it perfectly!
As for the second point, I'm not sure if I understand it correctly;
Basically you're saying you want a help tool that points the player in the right direction? Not like a tutorial, but an active tool throughout the game so that you're never confused about what to do? I agree with that, and I think the game tries to do that with the displayed code feature, but it falls off a little in some places
a tutorial could solve this as well, but I think a tool that is with you the entire game is more immersive
Yeah that's it. So more like a mechanic than a tool. I agree that's more or less what the snippets of code try to do. However, you can't interact witht them & they're not always presented in the same way. It's true that a tutorial might help but yeah like you're saying having something through the entire game would bring a good cohesion.
To try & phrase it in a better way, I was thinking of a gameplay mechanic that is yuour main if not only way to interact with the game. Of course, you can still move your chatacter freely & observe the level but if you want to get information needed to solve the puzzle or interact with objects then you would use that mechanic.
I think there's tons of way that could be done & fit in what the game already uses. Like if the snippets of code were in the editor, you might be able to re-write only some parts. To give a really simple example for level 6:
The editor could have a DATA tab. In it you would see the different objects in the scene. So something like:
- PLAYER [Read-only]
- PLATFORM [Read & Write]
- BUG [Write-only]
- EXIT [Read-only]
Each of those would be folders which contain some files. So in the PLATFORM folder there would be the "Settings.txt" file with "moving = false" in it. You could only edit the "false" to "true" to solve the puzzle.
Now for the other folders, those marked with [Read-only], you woule only be able to look inside of them & not edit anything. So maybe there's some "Info.txt" in the PLAYER folder & some funny stuff like "lastTimeSinceSawTheSun = tooLongAgo". As for the [Write-only], you would only be able to put files in them. That way you could copy / paste the "Setting.txt" from the PLATFORM folder & put it inside the BUG folder to get it.