This is a great little hidden gem!
Creative, fun puzzles that fit the theme well with a nice twist; and just the right difficulty level - and actually some narrative/lore!
Well done.
:)
Things I would suggest looking at:
1) in general, it's better to have puzzles that don't require just racking up steps to complete - use that sparingly if you make more because "I know how to solve it and I'm just waiting for the countdown" is only fun once or twice;
2) the RHS of the counter (the Y of X/Y) disappeared sometimes (especially with >100 steps banked);
3) it's not clear that math operations don't work in the dark world - everything else has visual feedback about how something has changed, but the "+1", "/2", etc. all look exactly the same as they did in the light world - I actually thought there was a bug with the final level, but I pushed on, believing in your claim that you playtested everything properly.
Viewing post in Hourglass jam comments
Thanks for playing!! ^_^
Regarding the feedback:
(1) Agree; levels 8-9 were a bit rushed due to being designed basically last-minute (even though the tile mechanics themselves had already been coded into the game on Day 2). I will definitely make some changes to these levels (and maybe even remake them from the ground up) for the post-jam version :)
(2) I added some safeguards so that the sand in each of the hourglass bulbs does not exceed 99. I tried also restricting the total sand (the sum in both bulbs) to also not exceed 99, but that wasn’t very intuitive with multiplication tiles while testing, so I rejected the idea. Looking back, I think it would make sense to re-implement a maximum capacity for total sand (but have it be first displayed in the level where you initially change the amount of total sand in the hourglass, so as not to confuse the player in the earlier levels).
(3) That’s actually a bug :D I really panicked when I discovered it while developing level 9, but couldn’t find what was causing the tiles to behave this way (The code looked fine and there were ~2 hours left until the deadline - I could’ve probably squeezed in a few more levels had I fixed the bug). There was originally a ‘multiply’ tile in the middle of the water and the intended solution involved sliding on the ice in the flipside mode (dark world). The level is still possible by using the ‘add’ tiles to rack up steps at the beginning, but it’s not the type of solution I was going for :)