Wow, thank you for your detailed feedback, you really found every detail I thought about while designing the game!
Thank you so much for mentioning the sound settings, I had to drastically cut the scope during the jam because there were at least four days where I wasn't able to work on the project. And on another day I was exhausted from coding an drew the frog 😅. And the last thing I decided to implement was the sound menu instead of character animations for example because I thought "nobody will NOT play the game because of missing animations but missing sound settings can be really annoying".
The grid-based movement was a simplification I decided for the gamejam to really focus on the rope mechanic. It makes it a little bit more puzzle like I think. I really have to carefully decide if I keep it or not for future versions.Thanks for sharing your thoughts on improving the game loop. For the gamejam version I ditched inventory upgrades to stay consistent with the "ten" theme. But I really would like to try making the player decide when they want to travel back to the surface. I think theres a good possibility for a risk/reward mechanic.
The blocks losing their visible cracks is actually a workaround because of a bug. The bug was cracks staying visible after destroying the block. As an easy fix I made it so, when a block is destroyed, all cracks that are present are destroyed, too. At one point I encountered performance issues in the windows version that I couldn't track down immidiatly. Since I used GameMaker objects for the cracks (something you should never do outside of a gamejam bc of the huge overhead) that was a possible reason for the slowdowns that the workaround took also care of
The cracks being visible in darkness wasn't directly intentional but I liked some things staying visible for more orientation so I left it that way. The music pausing in the upgrade screen is also not intentional but a result of the shop using the same pausing system as the actual pause menu.
The fact that you basically just have to balance all three upgrades is a very interesting point. Also that it was possible to get softlocked, I didn't think that was possible. In a future version I really would like try to make different character builds possible.
I implemented the timer because I wanted a more arcady type of game for a gamejam. Now I think the timer isn't really neccessary to make the game loop work.
I am sorry I wasn't able to implement an "end screen" after collecting the heart of the swamp. That would have been the very next thing if I hadn't been running out of time. I now added a note to the description of the game. At the bottom of the level I added a ore formation that forms a "10" as an easteregg for those who dig to ground, but that's a bit hard to see ingame.
Thank you.