Thank you so much for the feedback and the playthrough video!
You're right I could have done the tutorial better. There's two reasons it is the way it is; jam games tend to have low retention so I wanted to make sure that people who may leave early would still at least be aware of the game's mechanics (especially refreshing, since I knew that one would be fairly unique), and I wanted people to have a basic understand of their toolkit before being asked to use them in puzzles (somehow I figured that would be less confusing). There's better ways I could have gone about this of course, like shifting some of the tutorial elements to the level select area (eg, maybe level 5 could only be accessed by using a mirror/bounce square, since that's the first place those appear after the tutorial).
To answer your question about the reset button, it was R for most of the game's development, but CTRL+R is a browser refresh shortcut, and the overlap in controls and mechanics confused one of my playtesters, so the input was moved to T.
Some comments on the playthrough:
- Really interesting solution to level 1! You essentially used the red swap point in the way I had intended the yellow one to be used (specifically as a way to traverse between the two halves of the level). I hadn't thought of that.
- You were really close to the intended solution of level 2. There is a way to complete it with more forgiving timing by shooting into the upper row of red squares at the red swap point a little before your stored bullet hits the yellow swap point. I can see where the confusion came from, and I probably should have put the red swap point on the left of the red squares, rather than the right.
- Level 3 was mostly meant to be a reminder of the refresh mechanic, since it wasn't used in levels 1 or 2, but is used in the intended solutions of the last 3 levels. Wouldn't have been necessary if the game was better at introducing its concepts, like you mentioned. At the very least I probably should have copied the comment about the mechanic from the tutorial and pasted it into the level.
- I actually think your solution to level 4 you mentioned around minute 21 could have worked (you were just missing needing to refresh to get the red swap point back to its original position). Some real life stuff meant I didn't have most of the 4 days to work on this, so most of the levels were designed in a couple of hours, and as such have a few unintended solutions which are way more efficient than the intended ones.
- Interesting solution to level 4. Cool that you found a way to beat it without refreshing (even though some of those angles looked frustrating).
- Wow level 6 is broken, you're the second person to find a solution to it with 4 shots left, and it's a completely different solution too.
- You did reach the end of the game after level 6. The idea is that you've successfully 'repaired' the game, and the "break the game" button is just a reset so you can play again without clearing your cache. If you hadn't pressed it, it wouldn't have crashed after the countdown finished. You didn't miss much though, all the countdown does is halve the enemy spawn time and double the next countdown. I barely had any time to throw the ending together, but in hindsight I should have made the reset button only appear after a playthrough of the top down shooter 'game' you fixed.
Thanks again for uploading a playthrough! The feedback is invaluable.