Really cool puzzle game. I like the simple visual style, the colour scheme, the info on tooltips, the consistent UI, and many other things. There's a lot of details which make it feel polished and professional, like the animated loading screen, main menu, the animated text, and the fact it even has a level editor!
I'm coming from your post asking for constructive feedback. Quote from this post of yours: "I want to improve it and possibly release it in the future, so I need your feedback! Is it too hard, too easy, difficult to understand, you HATE it, you LOVE it! etc."
Despite enjoying puzzle games, and there are a lot of great things about this one, I naturally stopped playing on level VI the first time, because I ended up solving the puzzles before I understood what the puzzle was in the first place. The simple first levels, clearly intended to teach mechanics, can be easily brute forced or completed by accident. This left me feeling confused and unaccomplished while the game auto-returned me to the level select screen. To illustrate this, it was only on level IV when I figured out which box was providing power and which was receiving it. On later levels, there are a mix of good puzzles that got me thinking (e.g., XI, XV) and some that felt too easy for where they are (XVI, XVII trying to teach torque, maybe IV too). If I felt like I understood and deserved the wins I got, I would definitely consider purchasing the game!
I really like the look of the UI, and the tooltips in particular are very well done. It's clean and complete, but I have some notes for post-jam polish:
- On levels with multiple sources and receivers, I could not figure out which source/receiver the info on the top was referring to. It seemed to be attached to one of each. This was confusing.
- The banner at the beginning of each level disappeared too fast to read. Maybe have it disappear on keypress/click?
- It makes sense to have the puzzle name on the right instead of just saying "puzzle" (although it is quite funny to tell everyone that yes, this is indeed a puzzle).
- I found it unclear what "solved 01 (whitespace) \" meant, until I tried to figure it out just now. I still don't know why there is a slash (was conflicts supposed to be the same line?)
- The decimal point in target RPM on the right is hard to see. Makes it look like there's an extra zero.
- I always felt like I was reaching really far off up and left of the puzzle to select different gears. On my screen, there's a medium-gear-sized gap between the puzzle and gear selection. It would also be convenient to select through numbers for different gear sizes
I hope you find this helpful!