we've heard this A LOT. The idea behind the second level was to place a spring on the first spike, and to jump over the second one placing a fire platform on death. But we noticed after submission time was up that the ledge was too high and therefore the level impossible.
It was our first try at game design (I worked primarily on the art for the game and one of my friends did the coding), so play testing was not really in the timeline. We both have never done anything in the game dev scene. We thought the game was understandable after putting in around 50 hours in 4 days (it really isn't).
We are working hard on a post jam build that fixes a lot of problems that players from the jam have.
Thanks again for trying the game and giving feedback!
the lack of direction was noted before we submitted the game we only chose to patch bugs instead of work on polishing. Expect more clarity in the next patch. We are also not chosing to downscale because we just have to many ideas to downsize!
Thanks for the compliment, we know the mechanics are never really explained and in the patch after the jam we will include some controlls and general tutorial content.
Hey, thanks for the feedback, for your information we thought about cluttering, the purple hat doesn't spawn anything (we know this is never comunicated clearly to the player.) We are working on a patch that will be released immediatly after the rating period. We hope to work on these smaller issues and bugs in that build.
Is it possible that you tried to open the hat menu on the floating fire platform? It is a known bug that the moving platform interacts with the physics engine in a weird way when opening the hat menu while standing on it. This causes you to shoot up about 4 million pixels and causes the camera to lose track which in turn makes the game unplayable until you restart.
Thanks for the compliment I worked hard on the art for Ghostly Hats. We noticed too late that the game might be pretty hard for others. We also noticed that softlocking happens very quickly (1 wrong death and you can restart the level). We plan to finish the game after the Jam. The plan is to make at least 14 More levels and 3 more hats we also like to work on the polish for the game, and two key elements, the ability to undo the last death (against hard softlocking) and in larger levels a checkpoint somewhere.
