First off, thank you so much for the encouragement along with your continued support throughout development! All the positive thoughts really motivated me to push forward!
I still believe the second iteration has some potential if it were a faster game; overall it might be better reworked as a platformer since there’s a lot of movement involved. There would need to be some mechanism to reduce backtracking if you forget soil, as I imagine that will get tiring.
I do remember the first boss level being a roadblock back then! Off the top of my head, I think that level is somewhat still in the game, but I eventually polished it up and moved it to a later world. This is supported by the final game’s first boss level being named “BossLevel6”.
One other thing I didn’t mentioned in the postmortem - due to the fact that I had so many ideas it was impossible to cover them all - was I originally planned to have some type of machine shoot out the rocks, hence the name “RockShooters” in the Tiled maps and code for the moles. It just made much more sense to use the moles instead!
The rocks do indeed use the same sprite, just tinted differently for the different types. Some players even thought they were fireballs! I think part of that is attributed to the poor art planning I had for the echidna and moles later on in development. The rocks were susceptible to this since they were made alongside the moles. Good point about 7-B, haha!
While a Maze Burrow 2 isn’t out of the question, I always liked the thought of creating different types of games instead of numerous sequels. My next game may be a different genre entirely.