I've never had a game go completely smoothly, and I can't imagine anyone here has either.

For this jam I'm doing a top down puzzle game. I made a basic tile set, and every single time I make a new level I realize theres a tile or two for a specific arrangement that I need. I think I've re-imported the spritesheet and added tiles to the tileset at least 10 times now. And putting it all together is really inspiring me to learn auto-tiling when this is all over.

How's everyone else doing so far? have you run into any interesting bugs or unanticipated challenges?

My game has bouncing balls that do a variety of things when clicked and a funnel with a gate you can open/close.

The first person that playtested it didn’t realize you could click the funnel buttons, so he just clicked on balls and rightfully got bored. I added a hint to the first level saying all you needed to do was open the gate.

The next two people then didn’t realize that the balls could be clicked. They just opened/closed the gate and rightfully got bored.

It’s hard to communicate what you intend for players to do without forcing them to do it in-game; I probably should’ve made a mandatory click this then click this kind of tutorial, but oh well.

i could totally see that happening, I often wonder about how to balance that line of like, what does the player need to know and what will some think is too much information. I think I got lucky with this project since it's essentially a puzzle variant on an arcadey maze game.

Each concept I introduce has an extremely simple first level for its introduction. One thing that I think helped me was adding interstitial scenes with just a paragraph of text, between each level with that introduces the new concept, in a hopefully subtle and humorous way, which a few of my playtesters responded to well.

If I had something more complex going on I could see it being troublesome though.

Additionally your concept sounds very cool, and I look forward to giving it a shot, hopefully tonight, once I polish one tiny little thing in my game and officially submit it.