Wow, that one grew on me. It felt very janky at the start, and the controls need a lot of polishing, but after I got used to placing the stuff and moving the camera it really grew on me. It has a bad rats feel, but this one isn't bad, not by a long shot. I think you could work into a full game, just polish the controls, add more interactable elements to the level design, make a better tutorial and boom, you got a gem!

That was a really neat game. I feel like you have all the pieces to flesh it out into a more complete experience. Obviously, there are time constraints in a jam, but if you plan on doing more with this game (or doing another game like it), I would recommend:

1. Don't give the player all of the tools at once. Start them out with one and with each new one you introduce, have a specific problem in that level that only that tool can solve. This way you're slowly teaching the player what each tool does and in what situations each tool is ideal.

2. Start with smaller levels. I think with the large levels early on, people are more apt to give up sooner. If the player only has a few corridors (or only one) to navigate in the first level, they easily finish, feel victorious, and want to press on. Then you can slowly layer on more difficult pathways. Combine this with the first point, and you can easily expand your game so that it has a fair ramp up time while constantly giving players the victorious feeling of solving problems.

Once I got what each tool did, I enjoyed setting up my Rube Goldberg Machine, launching, and seeing what happened. It was really fun! I might recommend simply a "Play" button that launches/drops the ship instead of an arrow in order to streamline re-launches. Seems like the arrow tool does enough of the work of the initial launch to not need that initial launch arrow.

Great job with this one!

Nice game, I really enjoyed that you are not limited with how many parts you can use. It is not very challenging, but looks and plays amazingly.

ooookkaaaayyy it took me a while to get it but you can go deep (no pun intended) with that one. Definitely put 5 stars for the innovation that's a pretty unique concept (I personnally never played a game like this) cool!

The font is not always super readable and yeah, I got the same issue with the overlapping UI

The graphics are really pleasant, nice color scheme with these low poly tiles

Nice game! I did have to check the "How to Play" screen, try the game, then go back to "How to Play" to really understand it, perhaps mainly because I didn't realize you could only scroll while an effector is selected. But I really enjoyed the sort of Incredible Machine-style set up and watch it go gameplay.

I think one way to make it more approachable is with much smaller levels. As it stands, if I misplace something near the end of the course it takes a very long time to fix it and run through the level again, only to see that since my initial velocity was slightly different and an entirely new problem has been found. You can overcome this by just placing a ton of effectors everywhere but that's not very interesting, so I think the challenge mode with limited effectors and smaller levels could be the best way to play with the current mechanics.

It's cool that you implemented the metroidvania mode too. It was a good way to quickly get a feel for the effectors, but it doesn't feel like the mechanics were built for that mode.

The art is great, I love all the details packed in with the plants and coral, and well done terrain with nice variation. In combination with the colors it gives off a particular retro vibe that's very pleasing. It matches the hilarious Y2K story! The music fits too, though it does get a bit repetitive.

I think this game has a lot of promise in leaning into focused puzzles. You've really got great aesthetics, it just feels a bit slow to get to the action!

The game's hard to understand. I only played the first level. All those options seem cool at first, but I ended up using the one that pushes you in the direction you'd like, which kinda makes the others redundant. The "story" part was funny, maybe you shouldn't have it hidden on a menu.

And this is how the "How to Play" menu looks to me on my monitor:

Presented with this, I kind of wanted to give up on trying to understand the game. Like the person before me said, you should probably ease in the mechanics with a tutorial. Though, that's quite hard to do on a game jam.

Graphics are interesting, audio gets a bit repetitive after a while. Overall, an interesting concept that could use some polish.