Puzzle item obtained presentation ideas

I'm making the first puzzle to the game a doozy, see for yourself below.

I have a inkling that letting the player walk over a puzzle piece and it just disappear (and into inventory) without any recollection of that fact is a problem, but I'm unsure how to enable player to know they have the puzzle piece. Besides the text changing above the truck, what else should I use for this? Inventory images for EACH puzzle piece in the game?

 

Maybe this is enough, but what if the player misses the twinkle on obtaining item?

 

The sparkle is better, but still not great.
Why not put the sparkle on the object always, to indicate it can be picked up?
You could also make the player press a button to pick up an object, in order to make it active, instead of passive.

You could scale the object up while fading it out when its picked up, to indicate something happened?
You could animate the object to float around the player and then shrink into his pocket?

 

Well I don't want the player to know that piece is the key to continue until he has obtained it. So I can't sparkle all the time, but I do like the pick up object button. Cool!! Thanks!

 

To answer your question: I would really consider something like a simple information feed: "Picked up a Bolt"

It doesn't have to be invasive or anything if you don't want, just put in a corner so that it's out of the way, but noticeable.

Maybe you could spice it up by making your sparkles fly up into the air to grab a bit of attention, then fly over to the feed and disappear just as the feed item appears on the screen. Definitely make the sparkle effect more visible, whatever you do.

My thoughts that you didn't ask for:

I agree with your choice to not give away which objects are obtainable with a visual effect, but I think that objects like that bolt need to stand out a bit more so that they aren't missed entirely (make it bigger?). I also like the idea of pressing a button to pick it up, but if you're not careful this could just turn into the player just mashing the "Get" button while they walk and jump around instead of actually thinking, to make sure they get everything that they need.

If you aren't already, maybe you could only allow the player to pick up just about any object, but allow only one or two items to carried at a time. That way, the player would be required to consider carefully what they need to do. If most little pieces of things are obtainable, but many could turn out to be useless for a given task, then picking things up will need to be deliberate.

I do see that the wheel is physics-based, so perhaps select smaller items could be pocketed and certain larger items could be physics-based, which could add another nice layer of thought. This sort of system could even open up ways for your players to creatively solve the tasks in more than one way, which is very much in style at the moment.

 

The more you avoid text, the cleaner your interface will be, and the easier to localize.

I like @Habitablaba's suggestion to scale and fade the object on pickup. You could also tween it to the center of the screen while you scale it up, and then scale it back down while tweening it to the upper left or right corner (or wherever the inventory is). This also teaches first-time players the location of the inventory button. And sound is just as important as visual, so make sure to give juice to pickup sounds, too.

 

Very cool suggestions. I'll put these thoughts to use.. thanks @TonyLi, @Hyblademin, and @Habitablaba!

 

today i just threw together a quick inventory collection animation, it's a little rusty but your feedback has been useful.

 

Nice job! The audio and animation make it really clear. I'd be interested to see how it looks if you scale up the item/coin's size slightly as it starts to move toward the inventory box, and then scale it back down before it reaches the box. Just for a little extra juice.