amazing game, the mechanic is very interesting and creative, i hope it wins the jam and/or gets developed further after it,
i like the fact that there is no UI telling you how many grains you have and you need to manually count them, in a sense the player itself is a diagetic UI element.
a few minor issues, but nothing game breaking:
- you lose all momentum from moving platforms when jumping on them, which isn't how physics usually works.
- the player has infinite acceleration/deceleration, depending on the game/character you're going for this may be exactly what you want,
but adding a few frames of acceleration and deceleration makes characters feel less robotic and more fun to control - the death animation looks short, but when you die very early in the level you end on spending more time on the animation than you spend playing the game in that life, i'd recommend just skipping it if the player presses a button while its playing.
and a few ideas i had for the game if you decide to continue developing it:
- objects with their own gravitational field (e.g. like in super mario galaxy, just 2d), which would make keeping track of your grains even more chaotic
- moving platforms and/or saw blades whose position follows the amount of grains you have
- the ability to spend grains during the levels for some kind of collectible, so that more skilled players end up making the game harder for themselves.
(a different mechanic with the same goal can be found in shovel knight, that game lets you break checkpoints for gems, players want gems, so players that think the level is not too difficult end up making it much harder for themselves in an attempt to get gems) - the player's eyes should follow the mouse cursor and/or moving sawblades to make them look less static