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(1 edit) (+1)

This is a very impressive entry for sure. As a bigger game than most, I do have a lot more opinions about the game than others as well.

First and most important of all is that I think the game is pretty dang fun and engaging. The puzzles are interesting to solve and the mechanics is simple enough to get the hang of it (once you got through the tutorials that is). I think for the most part, the visuals are super solid. There's a lot of visual effects that are used everywhere in cutscenes and gameplay alike, which feels really nice and make the game seems more polished. The audio is also not bad, but there's a few small bugs like when the turn finishes, it plays multiple click sounds at the same time so it sounds louder than intended.

I agree with some other commenters that the tutorials is pretty long and all the other dialogues are also long. I hope to not sound too rude but I honestly think that the dialogue is not that engaging, so it adds to the feeling of lengthiness. I understand you were trying to tell a story, but it doesn't have to be long to be good and stories can be told as much with other elements than text, which is not what players expect when they play a puzzle game like this. The tutorials could also use more visuals and showing what happens on the screen rather than just saying them in text. For example, if it's a bad thing to have monster fight each other, I think it's much more effective and funner for the players if you force them to drop it in incorrectly so they can see what happens. The first time I got a death was like in level 4 or something lol.

I also think that many things in the game is currently unnecessarily long. I understand that sometimes as creators we want to show off our abilities but I think sometimes less is more. For example, I think the loading screen visuals are cool, but I'm really not sure if it takes all that long every time to load a new level in and out. Many other animations are also longer than I would have liked to see.

On the mechanics side, I also agree with another comment saying there's currently just one too many step to do some of the most common actions in the game, like checking the info panel and then closing it for example. One mechanics that has to do with visuals is the direction that characters is facing determine their area of sight, and currently many of the sprite looks very similar when they look down versus looking left or right. It just takes that much longer to think and process the puzzle, so I always try to remove as many hindrances as possible when making a game.

Hopefully I don't come off as too nitpicky, but I realize that you are a more experienced developer than most jammers, so I would like to give my feedback on the tiny things that players appreciate in a great game. So I hope it can help you somehow in the future.

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Thank you so much for playing the game. I really appreciate your feedback. It's one of those gems that makes game jams worth doing.

As for the tutorial, there's a golden principle: "Show, don't tell." One of the greatest examples of this is Half-Life 2. I also really like the point you made about showing the player what they shouldn't do, not just what they should do. We often understand light through darkness, right through wrong, and so on. That's a really good point.

As for the story, I'll be very honest: this was my first attempt at making a dialogue-based story. While I personally enjoyed it, I can absolutely see how it could become boring or frustrating for some players. That's actually why the skip button was one of my top priorities. I even extended the dialogue system just to add it. But hey, now I can clearly see where I went wrong and what I can improve to make the experience better next time.

As for the animations... guilty as charged. I've invested in a lot of tools, especially ones designed to enhance game feel, and I wanted to show everything I'd learned in this game. Looking back, I know it was a bit too much. Sometimes when you try to include everything, you end up diminishing the impact of each individual thing. Too many effects can take away from the beauty of having just one.

As for the number of steps and clicks required to perform actions, along with other UX-related issues, I agree with you there as well. Every jam, I tell myself that I need to dedicate time to player testing, because once you've spent enough time with your own game, you become too comfortable with it to notice its flaws. But then fast forward to the last half hour of the jam and it's usually, "Just submit the game and go to sleep." So I definitely need to find a better way around that.

Thank you so much for all your points. I genuinely appreciate comments like yours. They're exactly the kind of feedback that helps me improve and make better games in the future.