no worries, it seems a lotta people are struggling with the shovel. you have to hold down F while jamming it into a surface to work, our fault for not making it more clear
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Oh! I had seen your other reply with “F to plant shovel” but I didn’t get that you needed to “shove” it. I actually really like that, it felt really good and I made it much farther. I would HIGHLY recommend updating your itch page with this info, you can’t change the game files but you can edit the page as much as you want (mine always turns into a list of known bugs, and I rarely get screenshots or cover art at the start of the jam).
Obviously jam timelines are rough, but I highly recommend having a template, most jams allow boiler plate stuff like generic player controllers, menus, and relevant here, a rebinding menu. I was grooving for a few minutes then I mis-typed, letting go and falling much farther than I wanted to get up and try again. I think (but definitely not certain) adjusting the layout would make that error less likely but it’s also possible I’d … get the hang of it … with just a little more play time.
I wonder if this could work with a gamepad. This is one of the few times where I think gamepad would actually be a lot of work, but I can imagine putting each hand to a thumbstick working really well. I hope you keep working on this!