This is a really cool entry. I never would've thought to interpret the word "SPIN" as referring to quantum spin and making a game about chemistry. Easiest 5/5 to creativity & theme I've given this jam.
This game looks stellar from a visual standpoint. The art style is really cohesive, and the color choices are on point (I love cyan and orange for spin up & spin down). The music fits the setting of the game really well and is just a really good theme on its own; I never once found it irritating. The sound effects are also really well done.
I also found the gameplay concept to be really cool. You strike a good balance between fun gameplay and physical accuracy, and it all comes together really well. I especially appreciate the order in which you need to add electrons to orbitals. I could see myself coming back to a more polished version of this game and trying to rack up a high score whenever I need to kill time.
Now, moving onto criticism. I know you've gotten this a lot (enough so that you needed paragraphs of explanation on the main page), but this game is confusing. It's not that quantum mechanics is confusing, (I got the hang of electron order pretty quickly, though I might be biased since I knew this stuff beforehand). Rather, there are a lot of small things that go unexplained, get in the way of the player's intent, or otherwise make the game a lot more complicated to play than it needs to be. I'll go through it in bullet points, since it's a lot of disjointed stuff.
In regards to the tutorial:
- Having to aim the cursor at the atom for so long for it to progress is confusing. The only visual feedback that anything's happening is that tiny bar that very slowly shrinks over time; and it's not even immediately clear that it only shrinks if you hover over it since, again, it takes so long. If you don't notice that, it's very easy to think you're supposed to do something. I like the idea of making the player aim, but I'd suggest having the bar decrease faster, maybe change color when the player's hovering over it, etc. just so it's clearer that things are happening.
- Electron addition order could be explained slightly better. When we see the 3 p-orbitals for the first time, you're just told, "Here you have to fill each orbital with one of the same spin." And when you're done, then you're told, "Now fill each with one of the opposite spin!" By the end of this whole lengthy process (during which you're probably wrangling with the controls), you have to have remembered this whole "add three of one spin, then three of the opposite spin" despite having received this in two instructions far apart from each other. You also have to recognize that this is only for the 3 p-orbitals, despite this never being explicitly mentioned. I think you have to be a lot more explicit with the p-orbitals because they're a lot more confusing. You can explain s-orbitals as just "add one then the other", but you have to say something like, "These long orbitals work a bit differently. They always appear in groups of three, and they have to be filled together in sync," etc.
- The tutorial never explains that the last electron you picked affects player color, nor that player color affects attract vs. repel. I eventually realized this on my own after playing for some time, but this should've been explained during the tutorial. Alongside this, you should also say what attract and repel actually mean in terms of how you move electrons around, rather than leaving the player to figure it out.
- It's also never stated that your element changes for every electron you add, not every orbital you fill. This I think especially needs an explicit mention since this is a place where the game deviates from real life. Irl, atomic number is increased by adding protons, not electrons.
In regards to mechanics:
- I know you've been told this a lot, but the camera sensitivity is an absolute pain at vertical angles and makes traversal extremely tough. I think a lot of the confusion you've seen could be chalked up to people having a hard time controlling where they're going and what they're looking at.
- A simple WASD-space-shift movement control scheme would've been really nice . Since you're floating around in a 3D space without that solid of a surrounding environment, it can be really hard to perceive depth and gauge where you'll actually end up when you click.
- Speaking of depth perception, it's a massive issue when you're trying to repel electrons. Electrons don't go very far when you launch them, and it led to a lot of confusion early on. When I try to launch an electron at an atom, I expect the electron to actually reach the atom. The fact that it doesn't (even when it looks like it should, again owing the weird sense of depth) probably led to a lot of people being confused about what launching electrons was supposed to do. I imagine many tried repelling that first spin down atom, saw that nothing happened, and started scratching their heads.
- Also, the camera locking when try to repel electrons makes aiming way harder than it needs to be.
- It seems larger and larger atoms spawn in as the game progresses, but at a point it feels like I get larger atoms not by actually making them myself but by waiting for them to show up. Rather than giving the player a bunch of large atoms, I'd make reactivity increase more slowly and give the player time to build up their own atoms from hydrogens (maybe at most I'd give the player lithium).
There might be a couple of other things I forgot to mention, but that's what I can think of right now. Despite the paragraphs and paragraphs of criticism, I want to reiterate that I think this game is really really cool and has an impressive amount of effort put into it. With better controls, I could absolutely see it being my favorite in the jam. Awesome work!