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hey, thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

i'm not quite getting how you think the level progression should go?  like, clearly you found 01 too easy and insufficiently tone-setting, but it also seems like you think 04 and 05 are too much (at least for what i'm going for).  for what it's worth, i did put a lot of thought into the first level, and it went through a number of major revisions — i very much wanted something that would let the player goof around with the basic movement, even if they have very little platforming experience (and i've already had such a player!), but that would still be a nice quick little romp for someone more experienced.  (this is why the tips are on signs, intended to be readable as fast as possible, or ignored entirely if you like.)  almost all of the puzzle elements build atop the movement, after all, and if you come in e.g. not knowing that holding the jump button makes you jump higher, the entire rest of the game is going to be completely incomprehensible.  and there are people who don't know that!  everyone learns it at some point, and i can't guarantee that it won't be my game for someone.

i definitely don't want to call it a "tutorial", because then everyone will hate it, even those who would most benefit from playing it  :)

figuring out the right speed to ramp things up is pretty hard.  i don't want to dump half a dozen mechanics on the player at once, or the game turns into a clusterfuck of mystery objects — there needs to be something familiar to anchor to.  but the game is also inherently complex, so a lot of stuff needs introducing before it can get juicy.  i could just put you in a hallway where you run across each of half a dozen objects in a row, but...  that sucks, and is boring, and is too artificial to give you a good sense of what's going on anyway.

like, 02 is actually called "the grate outdoors" because it was originally the level that introduced slime, and it was entirely about slime...  but then i realized that i hadn't yet introduced any of the things slime interacts with differently (or the same), and you had just gotten your kiss power but not yet used it.  i tried having a separate level before it that introduced kissing, but then you spent a whole level basically just kissing your way through heart panel mazes and doing nothing else, and that meant you did two levels in a row with no transformation — the core conceit of the game!  so i ended up with what i have now, where 02 is a hopefully smoother run through (a) special abilities; (b) a new kind of terrain, grate-likes, through which your kiss can travel; (c) spikes, damage, and your general invulnerability; and finally (d) hey you can turn into stuff and it interacts differently with some of that stuff.  which is still a lot, really, but i think the way it's arranged makes for a semi-coherent "narrative" as each thing leads into another, and then the next level gets to explore slimes in more depth.

04 is deliberately a big adventure — you are climbing a mountain, after all  :) — but it really only centers around two things: a new thing you can do (the box) and a new kind of obstacle (signs).  and for the most part i think it's a fairly straight shot towards the exit?  05 ends up more complicated thanks to several conflicting design constraints, but it adds a few more things because those things are mostly building on what you already know at that point: here are more things you can turn into, and more things you can pick up.  but it does meander a lot towards the end, which is made worse by the heavier focus on backtracking, and honestly i'd like to take a hacksaw to it. 

i do like tonal shifts, though.  most likely the next levels after where the demo cuts off will be shorter and quicker, focus more on things you already know, and maybe have a clever twist that doesn't involve introducing new mechanics.  i guess one big design constraint is that the treasures and hearts are what grant access to new levels, so the whole game is on the precipice of being non-linear, and i have to cram in as many basics as i can before it opens up.  the demo is essentially that "cram" part.

so, i don't know.  i'm very hesitant to make 01 be about more than the fundamentals (of which there are already quite a few), and i did chuck in a transformation at the end to give you a hint as to where things are going.  it would be a shame to lose players on the back of a first level that can be finished in under a minute...  but you did keep playing, so it can't be too bad?  :)

uhh anyway i also kind of meandered there

the star anise economy is definitely screwy in the demo — the items are intended to be doled out naturally as you collect candy, without ever requiring active grinding, but of course it's hard to space them out when there are only five levels.  i just sort of made up some numbers and hoped for the best  :)  the idea is that in the finished game you'll naturally get a steady drip-feed of shop items, but if you do replay levels for hearts or a better time, or even just go out of your way to get more candy on your first pass, you get a little reward in the form of accelerating the shop conveyor belt.

also, there is in fact a fox encyclopedia, and that would've been one of the very first (cheap!) items you can buy, but it's not finished yet so it's not in the demo.  that definitely throws off the item curve, and it would've made it more obvious that shop items are very miscellaneous and not all new abilities.

and for that reason i don't think it makes sense to dither individual candy you've obtained before — other items are dithered because getting them again doesn't really accomplish anything (unless you're going for 100%), but getting the same candy again is still...  more candy.

there is definitely jump buffering!  the window is kind of arbitrary — offhand i think it's 0.1s — but if i made it any wider then jumping worked when i was still visibly a good distance off the ground, and that felt weird.

i don't know if corner-clipping is feasible, though.  i put a kind of ridiculous amount of effort into having pixel-perfect collision, and...  well, you won't get shifted sideways out of a cliff from landing on its edge too fast, but in exchange, corners are very fussy about not passing through each other.

it's very interesting that you got the star in 01 but not the heart.  you're not the only one, either — and it seems like that heart is more likely to stump more experienced players.  it's completely fair, but i suppose it plays with expectations enough to throw folks off.  i'm not in the habit of spoiling my own puzzles though  ;)

i do actually have a slime spawner, but i didn't want to use it in the first one-and-a-half slime levels for a number of reasons — the best one being that you can't possibly make purrl happy if there are infinite slimes.  :)  also i think it encourages you to think about the consequences of altering the level, even in subtle ways, and better to do that when things are easy.  i do want to fix the softlock at the end of 02, but in a way where you still realize it would've been a softlock if not for...  you know, something.

several players have been tripped up by not expecting they could climb down through a platform, which honestly is a surprise to me because i just take it for granted as a normal rule of platformers.  (see, this is why 01 is only about movement!)  the beginning of 05 makes it pretty obvious, but of course you won't have seen that yet.  i might also have accidentally implied this is impossible in 03, where you can't climb back down the vine at the beginning as slime — because slime can't climb at all.  i can probably fix this in 01, by putting a platform on the vine that drops down between the two groups of pyreflies and making it pretty obvious what you're doing.

anyway, thank you!  glad you liked it.  now i just gotta hustle and finish it  :)