It is uncanny how much it sounds like you were part of the team and our planning phase before it all went off the rails, everything you mention was either discussed, originally planned, scrapped from scope, problems we noticed but didn’t have time to fix or other hahaha. I agree though, we really, really would have benefitted from a level designer on the team—The only section in the game that was not thrown together nilly willy in some capacity was the huge bookcase which had some setpiece planning around it for level design. And the execution on that one still has … room for improvement if we wanna put it generously (it was me who put that in, I can say that about my own work xD)
The original concept was something closer to “you, the wizard’s cat, are trapped in the fight between the heroes and the wizard. The game acts as if the wizard is the important guy and achievements are given for things the wizard does. The cat just happens to be there, and you play by doing cat things and interacting with random magic junk the wizard has lying around in his tower, not really caring for the fight going on around you. Also there’s a rat to catch, much more important than whatever those humans are doing.”
However the action and whimsical magical interaction things were at odds with one another so we went less down the action route, banking on having a lot of art to put to use and make unique small fun interactions (like the bubble room)… Then yeah stuff happened and here we are lol. I did put in some assets from the action playtest in though if you try to touch the cauldron you’ll see what that is.
Oh and very interesting feedback on the small jump. I advocated for adding that because I felt like using the pounce for everything was clunky (I was getting sick of having to charge a pounce over every little thing in playtesting) and didn’t really sell the feeling of being a nimble cat. We couldn’t find a combination that combined both purposes of the charged jump and a simple one button directionless jump into a single button.
What we really would do if we had another few days was to get the sound part of the game in properly, we have a lot of unused sounds that we didn’t get to implement due to time pressure. I honestly think this is the most bare bones sound thing we could get away with. I feel sorry for Joe who spent the time putting those together, but at least we got four out five of his songs into the game hahaha
Thanks for the feedback (and the love for my tail simulation!) <3