Hey, just played through the first world again. Will finish the rest of the demo soon. The puzzle design, progression, and feel of the game are all excellent. So my feedback will wander a bit, and share a few things I've been pondering.
- It's worth thinking about whether or not you want to use your real name in distributing the game. Personally, I like it and think it's a good idea. It didn't seem to hurt the Stardew Valley dev so who knows if it matters.
- You should start your game fullscreen. It's similar to the difference between watching a movie on your phone, vs. in the theatre. A fullscreen game is implicitly asking the player for their attention, and promising that it will be worth it. This game is worth it. A windowed game is not really occupying the players mind, their email tab is open behind, their calendar is shooting up notification in the corner, their discord icon is flashing. Giving the players the option to window the game is plenty.
- After a ton of trial and error and experimenting, I have personally found that breakpoints are a far superior method of scaling for a pixel-perfect 2D game than letterboxing. The idea is this: At 1x resolution, there is a min and max width, and a min and max height you are willing to allow. The "ideal" 1x resolution might be 480x270, or whatever. But the game is guaranteed to work down to 420x230, or whatever, and up to 520x300. Once you have determined that, you can look at the size of your window, and determine whether you are going to be at 1x, 2x, 3x, etc.. I go all the way to 8x. The end result, if you take the smallest window and slowly start increasing its size, the screen area will grow, grow, grow, then snap to 2x, then grow grow grow, snap to 3x, etc... All the while, it fills the entire window space as best as possible. With well tuned breakpoints, the vast majority of screens will be completely filled, with pixel perfect scaling. I made a video showing what it looks like
- On your sound toggles, the control should be exponential, because hearing is logarithmic. Read here for more info: https://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/volumecontrols.html Simple fix that really improves things. With this, a sound control halfway down will "sound" like its at half volume, instead of staying mostly the same, and then getting really quiet at the end.
- More to come...