Man I really have to look into seeing if there's something going screwy with loading in the levels...

I'm happy to hear the tutorial level did its job, I knew I wouldn't have time to make a really polished tutorial and I also didn't wanna make it terribly intrusive with popup screens. So I decided to just basically make the first level a collection of all the interactions and movements required throughout the game, kind of forcing the player to understand the basic mechanics to truly start. I actually got the idea partially from the level/difficulty selection maps from Quake, mixed with some streamers I watch suggesting any platformers in a game jam should just make their main menu a playable level.

Would you believe I was actually worried the enemies would look too normal during development 😂?

I think the Bruiser getting stuck might be because its jump attack wedges it into a section of navmesh that its navmesh agent is too tall to walk through. That might be what caused it to break, though really it should've been able to break back out with another jump attack.

Wow, I actually had to go back over the game to add more ammo after the first couple comments. I did realize after watching other people play it that the game doesn't effectively demonstrate how useful the slam is for killing enemies and conserving ammo. Especially since in hindsight the first level isn't really ideal for it. If I ever get around to makin another level I'll have to make it much more encouraging of using the slam.

The second cutscene is actually an adaptation of a weird dream another indie dev had, and after he described it on discord I immediately knew I had to put it in a game somehow. The cutscenes do have some form of logic behind them, in an admittedly very obtuse way, but the second cutscene is the most disconnected.

Yeah after the Stalewater opening cutscene ended up being 3 minutes long, I knew I had to either not have one this time or make it as short as possible. The opening is actually one of the last things I did before submitting iirc.

The level art was more inspired by Cruelty Squad with all of its intentionally horrible and confusing textures. Didn't have time to give unique textures to a lot of the areas so I had to settle for prototype grid textures in a number of cases.

Also I'm happy to hear you enjoyed the mechanics as much as I enjoyed implementing them lol.

Sorry you were unable to finish it, but I'm glad you enjoyed what you did play. Oh and another belated happy birthday!