First of all, wow, thank you so much for the detailed review. It's very much appreciated, and I want to give you some thought process behind those decisions:
- There wasn't much time for narrative and cohesion with the amount of features we added. The tutorial text we thought would be enough alongside the intuitive nature of the game. Adding features is always fun but then explaining them and making sure they have no bugs is the part no one wants to do haha. So thats understandable. If we had another person in engine, or more time it would have been addressed.
- Personally, I was working on refactoring the tile placement to be more optimized. I found creating all these objects at runtime wasn't a good idea, and it started to lag quite a lot. Really glad that you saw it working fluidly there, with all of those mechanics in place.
I had the luxury of working with some great talent so I was able to just work on all of the code, optimizations etc.
- For the UI, we made the hud, setup, and gameover scenes from scratch. The leaderboard was made using a plugin, but I don't think creating that from scratch is really a good priority in a jam either. Most UI stuff were just last minute additions, so I understand the frustrations there as well. The only thing we used the template for was the main menu options and loading screen. That was to rebind controls, etc. If its going to be the same every time, I don't know why you have to spend dev time recreating them. I wouldn't really compare that with AI, that's doing it a bit of disservice, when the team wants to prioritize other tasks. Especially since its the most taxing and tedious part, imo, working with the UI.
Glad you had some fun with the game, and nice top score there, and once again thank you for the review!