Thank you for the detailed feedback!
Much of the feedback you've given are things that hopefully will be addressed by the next build, such as input prompts during the tutorial or after the player dies.
The win condition is not entirely clear from starting a level, it also is a bit confusing to go from the tutorial that teaches you a about elements that you pick up once to unlock a portal and "escape" to the first level that has respawning elements instead that you have to constantly bring to "goal" areas. It feels like you're taught a different game from the one you go to play.
This is probably one of the weakest parts of the current onboarding- I'm curious if you have any particular suggestions for how I might address this? Unlike the normal stages the tutorial stages have a clear start and end because the purpose is to get the player through each stage to teach them the core mechanisms of the game. The challenge here is that apart from a handful of trial stages that do have a specific goal (like in the tutorial stages, the arenas are high score based. I'm open to suggestions on how I might be able to better onboard this during the tutorial if possible!
I also found the dash on release a bit weird, I think it is thought with the intention of carefully aimed dashes, but because of the fast game pace you're mostly fast-dashing and for that the release doesn't work as well as the press.
Yeah, the dash is one of the player controller aspects that I'm considering adjusting. I think there are some things I could do to make the current implementation feel less bad to new players, but I'm also not 100% sure if I want to keep the system working in the current manner.
If arenas is (presumedly) the main game mode, it should be up and centre. Having the "go back" option at the top is a bit unintuitive as we generally read top to bottom.Interesting, I hadn't really considered this perspective. The reason I have it set up in the current manner is to make each button point towards the menu it's associated with. Perhaps it's worth making the menu above the titlescreen menu instead of below? That way I can still have the buttons 'pointing' in the correct direction but have the least important button at the bottom instead of the top.
Graphics acceleration off entirely murders the game, aside from that it worked pretty well!
Yeah, I suppose this isn't super surprising. I'm doing some fragment shader stuff to handle the coloring in a dynamic way. If it turns out to be an issue I can probably eventually make some setting to disable some of the most performance hungry shaders haha.
Thanks again for the feedback!