Droblin, that calculator game is a real compliment. One number, one press, physics does the rest. That is exactly the shape I was going for. The tweakable-parameters idea is a good pull too, I have been circling something like it. One question, no wrong answer: how far did you get before you stopped, and was it because you wanted to or because it stopped being interesting? That is the one thing I cannot see from here.
Hm, thinking about it now, why did I stop...
I actually spent a couple of minutes with the game. Being able to see how much force I was about to apply gave me this feeling of "I’m in control, I can try again," a bit like those claw machines in shopping centres.
I think I stopped because there wasn’t much sense of visible progress, like "something new is happening" as I keep playing.
Droblin, that's the exact thing I couldn't see from here. You named the real hole: every level asked for the same hold, so there was nothing new to learn.
So I changed it. The required charge is different at every level now, short, long, shortest, longest, and it keeps moving. The opening demo actually jumps too, so the first thing you see is hold, release, fly.
If you come back: the question is whether it now feels like "something new is happening" as you go. If it goes flat by level 5 again, tell me, and that's the next fix.