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Heya, nothing to apologize for when expressing what you think!

I'll try to answer everything to the best of my capability:

-We wanted to make the controls very responsive and crisp, but the strain it causes when playing fast was an oversight on our part. We already have some ideas in mind!

-This was our first game jam, so we began with using the one screen concept, because it would prevent the scope of the project getting too huge for the jam. After that we started thinking about fun concepts we could do in just on one screen and started coming up with the management puzzle gameplay idea in which you can only carry one item at a time, and craft everything from a single material and  then have to manage multiple things at once :) We fell in love with the concept of the game, so we quickly locked it in, even though it's not super out there in terms of the theme, but it fits! We're actually quite happy, because without the theme, we wouldn't have come up with this. It worked as great inspiration to spark up ideas without being really restricting.

-Yeah, it kinda makes no sense! Our internal explanation was that items staying too long in the water start to rust so they go bad! We wanted to implement more management and panic into the gameplay, and we didn't mind being a little unrealistic.

-At one point we were thinking about an item drop mechanic, so you could throw stuff on the floor and pick them up later. We scrapped it though, because we didn't want the game to be about pre-making weapons. It would've defeated a lot of the urgency of the game. You can still kinda temporarily store items by putting them on the crafting table, but not fully completed ones. We'll consider it in terms of the future of the game though :)

-Our thought was that after you took the handle out of the water you wrap it in leather.  We'd love to implement more materials and steps to making stuff later. From design perspective, the handle needed to be visually different from the blade part, so they don't get mixed up.

Thank you for your comment and all the questions you raised! :) I hope I've answered everything sufficiently!