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I finished the game! And then again at 100%!

Only thing I haven’t tried is a different reply at the Celestial Guardian’s question. I should probably restart the game once to see the initial lore text anyway, because I saw it a while ago and forgot about it, and apparently it’s important to understand the Dream Guardian’s story. Maybe it would be better to split lore more across the story and remind player of previous events when meeting Celestial Guardian so we remember what we fight for (although I understand that the jam game was meant to be finished in one session).

Speaking of which, while the game looked super long and collecting pearls looked daunting, once I unlocked fast swimming everything went pretty fast. It feels like skills were meant to be unlocked more gradually since have double jump + wall jump + flight as the end was too much. Flight didn’t have an animation ready so it looked more like a “debug” skill to make sure player can explore the full level and finish the game at 100% (it could have been unlocked after defeating the last boss, as a cool “now you can become Super Sonic anywhere” bonus). Maybe it was meant to be a true skill like gliding (with some slow descent like Knuckles). For a proto animation, I think the Swimming left/right animation would have been a better placeholder (although probably even funnier to see her swim in the air). Anyway, it did help me to get all the pearls including those tricky ones in the tidal area.

Very impressive dialogue boxes, I didn’t remember them from my first run (maybe they were added in a later update, or I was confusing them with the first lore text which was very barebone unlike dialogues). And would probably require a lot of work on localization (but might as well not care too much about it for the jam).

Now for some issues I’ve encountered:

Dialogues

• Leilana voice actress is much more clumsy that the artwork suggests (probably emotional face/body pose variants would help, as usual in Visual Novel, but obviously needs more budget)
• Dragon Guardian: “Magic, remember?” line voice is incorrectly played on “We’ve become intertwined. You wear now the armor of the Pearl.”
• when Celestial Guardian asks question: “my question If” has no punctuation but uppercase (not sure about exact text)
• On Celestial Guardian’s line “She’s right, It was an accident” there is no voice (and no need for uppercase I)

Level

• Trap triggers only activate when character goes through a certain area, so it looks inconsistent if player goes through the same rooms in slightly different ways

Combat

• condition to “reload” melee attacks is unclear: is there some cooldown? Sometimes I deal 1, sometimes 3 hit combo. There is no gauge nor visual/audio feedback to tell.
• We unlock move skills (3 at once at the end: double jump, wall jump and horizontal flight) but no new attack skills, so at the end, we feel super powerful having god-like power… but at the same very weak in battle (maybe the reason why last boss was made very simple, or maybe it was just a time issue)

App / Input

• I need to press D-pad or another button to have gamepad recognized, instead of just left stick. I myself did exactly the same in my game following the recommendation of the Metroidvania Forge Tutorial “not to accidentally recognize a gamepad plugged on the computer that had stick drift”. As it turned out, it was a pretty edge case, whereas wanting to use gamepad left stick to move immediately after switching window was common (when testing game in Godot or after writing a feedback like this one) so I decided to detect left stick anyway (still with a deadzone, as usual).