itch.io

I'm only 45 minutes in, I basically just finished the tutorial cognitive test area, I might play more later but I have some notes. So far I'd say I'm enjoying it, there's a lot of good ideas here for sure, but it does feel a bit lost in limbo between being a metroidvanian game and a linear puzzle platformer. I'll circle back to that, but I can start by talking about the segments I did play.

I really liked the hub area at the start, with the different sodas you can interact with, it's a fun space to kinda play around and experience a taste of what the game is gonna be about. Then I started on the tutorial puzzles which were... idk, fine? Pretty basic so far, nothing really cognitively engaging, but it's the tutorial so whatever. I think every puzzle involving the gravity panels is analogous to some puzzle in Portal 2 with the tractor beam things. The jump pads weren't really being used as a puzzle element in any capacity, you just use them to get to higher platforms so it's really tame compared to the launch pads in Portal 2 which interacted with all the physics objects so it was better integrated. The pink cube was kinda underutilized there, I liked the puzzle where you had to place it on a platform then move the platform to deactivate a pressure plate remotely, but the other puzzles involving the pink cube were uninspired. Overall the area was okay, I was intrigued by the potential of the mechanics but it was definitely longer and more drawn out than it needed to be.

Personally I think you're starting on the wrong foot though, loading up the game I was really excited to get my gravity flipped and have to solve puzzles by walking on walls and ceilings and stuff, so it's a bit of a drag having to go through 20 minutes of cubes and buttons. Not to mention it's spatially confusing, since a lot of these puzzles involve remotely manipulating gravity fields, but sometimes it's hard to see or tell what's going on or where the cube is going because it's in first person. The puzzles I've played felt like they would fit better in a 2d game where you can see the whole game state. Portal and some other 3d games have those puzzles sometimes where the character is locked in one spot and must remotely interact with a "puzzle wall", adopting that viewpoint would help too, but honestly I'd rather just have puzzles that take advantage of the first person view by making the challenge "how do I get there".

There's also the matter of the game feel. I dunno, I see some other commenters saying the movement feels good, but I'd have to disagree. As soon as my character jumps it's like I'm a bar of soap, you have so much air acceleration but no deceleration at all that the act of like jumping onto a box is really really difficult, I keep overshooting it or undershooting it. If you fling yourself in one direction with a jump pad, your air control is so strong you can fully reverse your momentum and slam into the wall behind you, doing an aerial U-Turn, but small corrections are impossible. I also noticed some odd interactions, like if you jump into a wall and hold towards the wall you kinda stutter fall to the ground. If you jump shortly after landing you actually jump higher, maybe this is intentional but it seemed like maybe a physics bug. I also occasionally got stuck on some geometry, like stepping onto a jump pad or pressure plate.

Lastly the metroidvania stuff... The rooms are huge, the passageways look similar so it's hard to get your bearings. I appreciate the purple line guiding me on the critical path, but once I walked off the purple line and got lot lost for like 5 minutes trying to find my way back. There were too many directions I could go, and not any obvious roadblocks like I would expect in a metroidvania game, it was completely overwhelming. Your game desperately needs a map, with like explored room tracking, show connections you haven't explored and places you haven't been. A map is really important in any metroidvania but I'd emphasize that in a game where the gravity can get all screwed up you need a really really good mapping system or players will get lost constantly, our brains are not built to navigate "true" 3d spaces like this.

Also level design wise I'd typically advise against the hub-and-spoke model for a metroidvania game, it tends to drain the fun out of exploration and figuring out where your powerups can be used if areas are sectioned off like that. Metroidvanias benefit from having less structure, or unintuitive structure that is revealed over time, or even using hub-and-spoke in smaller doses like within an area to create grounding at a local level.

And a critical missed opportunity in your metroidvania was with your first powerup. There's nothing at all wrong with a good double jump, but the reveal is kinda wasted here. In a metroidvania the delight of acquiring a new powerup is not just becoming stronger, but also imagining all the places you can use it to do new things. By positioning the double jump at the end of the tutorial area, there is none of that. I should be excited to go back and use my new powerup to reach several ledges that were out of reach earlier. Like the entrance to "area 2" should be backwards and up high, not forwards and through a ground level doorway, as well as other secrets sprinkled around in places I've already visited. Even something as simple as having a soda high up on a ledge in the break room would drive intrigue. But honestly, I didn't even expect a reward for finishing the tutorial at all, just opening the door to the main area and "unlocking" the game would have been sufficient progression.

... Anyways, don't take the criticism too hard, I tend to have more to say about games I like and that I think have a lot of potential. If time permits I'll play more of your game later... and I'll try to write more concisely next time. :P

I put about 20 minutes into this, so the criticism is maybe a bit surface level. I'm not a fan of the genre, but I've enjoyed Cookier Clicker and Insaniquarium, so I can get into it if the conditions are right. This one isn't really clicking with me though. Like it's doing the thing correctly by "unfolding" all these mechanics incrementally and giving me more to do and think about, but at the same time nothing really changes. I can only derive so much interest out of upgrading my ability to click on the screen less. The upgrade tree I found confusing, like it's presented as an optimization problem where I should figure out what upgrades are most worthwhile, but they all feel like they basically do the same thing, because there's really only one metric that matters: dps.

I'm aware that criticism can apply to literally any incremental game, as someone with limited experience in the genre it's really difficult for me to frame why this feels mindless and pointless but cookie clicker does not feel mindless and pointless (even though it is). Perhaps it's because it's missing that exponential growth dopamine that hacks your brain into thinking you're making so much progress that it stops caring that you're not really doing anything. Or maybe it's missing the aspect where I save my currency now so I can get a super great upgrade later vs spending it now for a less good upgrade; that aspect is important because it gives you something to look forward to in the long term driving you to stay with the game longer while also continually awarding you for engagement in the short term with small dopamine hits too.

I normally like to give specific actionable feedback, but I'm a bit at a loss here. I can't really envision myself enjoying this without some significant changes that'd turn it into something it's not. Insaniquarium has conflict and tension in it which keep the gameplay loop engaging because you can actually make wrong choices, loose progress, and fail entirely. Although I'd prefer if your game had that, it seems you're deliberately not going for that kind of design, so I'm probably just not the target audience.

edit: oh, forgot to mention, I am not a fan of the title screen music at all, it feels like it belongs in a completely different game.

Hi! I'm glad you liked it, thanks for coming back to leave your feedback! Since your stream we did add a little aiming reticle. It's just a straight marker that shows where the fish is pointed at, I hope that it is sufficiently helpful to players!

About the vod mute... the music is permissively licensed but yet it is registered with Content ID. I don't know why the musician chose to do that, it's very confusing and this is all new to me. We'll get a different track for a future version of the game to avoid this problem, but if you want your VOD unmuted you can theoretically appeal it with the license certificate, although I'm not familiar with Twitch's appeal process so I can't say for sure. https://pixabay.com/music/beautiful-plays-smooth-waters-115977

odd, MacBooks usually have pretty good screen resolution, I wouldn't have guessed that but it's probably a dpi thing... regardless that's an easy fix. I reduced the web viewport size to 960x540, which I think should work on all smaller screens, and hopefully not be too tiny on big ones as well.

Hi, thank you for checking us out!

Could you be more specific? Maybe show a screenshot or recording if you can reproduce it? This is a new problem to me, nobody has reported anything similar before. The camera is supposed to move ahead, but it's definitely not supposed to position the Fish off screen.

edit: if I had to guess, maybe the game viewport is being cutoff in browser, so what browser and screen resolution you use might be relevant. Also if you have a moment, I'd appreciate if you double checked your browser zoom level and maybe tested to see if it's reproducible in fullscreen mode.

Hey, this is excellent! I had a great time, and didn't find it too frustrating (a smidge frustrating, but an acceptable smidge). I have some suggestions though:

The biggest issue I had was the blind jumps. It's a bit annoying flinging myself into walls that I had no way of knowing were there, or dropping onto hazards that were off screen. Check my playthrough video for examples, I point it out basically every time. You could benefit a lot from a more dynamic camera, or maybe just zooming out aggressively. You would need to pair this with my second suggestion for it to not break the controls though...

The controls are... well they're fine. Fun even. But a bit... eh... uncomfortable. I wouldn't want to play this for hours, it'd hurt my wrists. I think you could improve it a lot by breaking the 1:1 relationship with the mouse position and the tongue position. Let me use my entire screen, and not just the tiny portion of it near the character. This is even more exacerbated if you're not playing in fullscreen, pay attention to that in your playtest data, I'd suspect anyone who doesn't fullscreen will struggle more. Heck, you could make it like a fps where you "lock" the cursor to the screen and just write your own tongue control logic, this would let you add a sensitivity slider and everything too. Might even be worth having a "precise movement" button you can hold down to reduce the sensitivity, idk, something to try.

However, I think the biggest missed opportunity is a very simple one. You should make this a mobile game. Seriously. Godot has automatic touch to mouse conversion. You're like 2 simple changes away from supporting mobile, and that would just feel so nice, it'd probably solve the uncomfortable controls for a lot of people instantly; touch screens are far more intuitive. I tried to load the game on my phone, there are some minor issues you'd have to sort out: 1 - the tongue lags like a frame behind the cursor, so when you touch the screen you grab the wall where the tongue was and not where your finger is. This is very annoying and makes it way harder to play than intended, you'll see what I mean immediately if you try to load the game on your phone. 2 - phones don't have keys, so you'd need an on screen restart and pause button. Oh and I guess 3 - flag it for mobile support in itch so it doesn't give scary warnings about incompatibility.

I have my gameplay recorded for reference. Keep in mind I'm not a content creator, these are just the ramblings of a dev. 

Also would love if you checked out my submitted game, but there's no obligation, I checked your game out simply because I wanted to! But, it's in a similar genre so I figured maybe you'd have constructive thoughts, or possibly (hopefully) even like it.

I checked it out, I'm not really a "new" player anymore so my input on it won't be as valuable unfortunately. But the new stuff is definitely an improvement, it explains the basic mechanics pretty succinctly which is a big help when getting to the next areas, since you aren't fumbling around trying to figure out how to interact with the game while also trying to find the way to progress. I will say I still don't understand the scissors very much, they seem a bit under-utilized? Like there's lots of things you can cut, but I didn't notice it ever really helping after the tutorial. And the first transition where the cat carries you up happens really quickly, I can't tell what's going on it happens so fast, you're exiting one doll then you're exiting another, then the cat is floating away without you, and I barely have enough time to read the text, let alone process what's on my screen.

Beyond that, seems things stayed the same so far, but I have some more observations. Beyond the tutorial, it'd be helpful to isolate some of the mechanics more, give each one space so that the player is only asked to learn one thing at a time before you start asking them to combine stuff. For example, I like the puzzle where it seems you have to combine sing and song-fly, but it's awkward to deduce because this is my first time encountering singing (I don't know what the purpose of the singing doll is), floating (I didn't even know it was a mechanic until I equipped the doll), and songfly. I'm being asked to make a lot of assumptions before I can even think about a solution. You could break this down into like 3 puzzles: first a puzzle where you need to learn how to float in order to progress. Then a puzzle where you need to learn how floating interacts with singing in order to progress. And finally the current puzzle where you have to deduce to combine the two and achieve flight.

Also more broadly, I'm noticing there's a troubling pattern with the game design that will make it difficult to make good puzzles in the future. The way you've built it, the complexity compounds together, because at any point you can carry things inside yourself from one area to the next, you can always go backwards and fetch an earlier doll. Every time a new shell is discovered it just adds more interaction space and there's no point I can mentally shelf something I encountered earlier. For example, if you've played Portal, that game separates puzzles with "material emancipation grills" that prevent you from bringing items from an earlier area into the next puzzle. So I don't have to remember that there was an extra box in chamber 4, because I know if I tried to carry it into chamber 5 it would be destroyed. For a more relevant example, the game COCOON is a puzzle game about entering worlds inside of worlds similar to this game. It is very carefully designed to make it impossible to carry extra puzzle elements forwards in the same way to prevent complexity runaway, and when you can carry an entire world forward with you, they segment that world with one way gates to prevent you from straying off the critical path. 

I don't know how I would address that for LILITH, but it's probably worth thinking about. Improving that would make the task of designing puzzles easier too. You can just design in isolation, and if you want to rework a puzzle or reorder something later you wouldn't have to worry that it'd break something else.

That's actually something we were considering... It's already totally playable on mobile if you ignore the compatibility warning on itch, but it's missing some important features like air control and quick respawn, hence why we don't advertise it. I've done a full game run on my phone before, so I can at least guarantee it's winnable.

Thank you for checking us out! Pretty much all of that is on our list of things to improve once we grow past our "48 hour game jam" version. The current framing is limiting, but sufficient for "testing the waters" for player interest. This also explains why the difficulty curve is so aggressive; I want to showcase the full potential of the game idea within our single 20 minute level. That said, I've seen some people struggle hard and others breeze through it in 10 minutes, so the perceived difficulty is very sensitive to experience level too.

So I did continue for a bit, made it to the end of the "demo" I guess since it said I need to continue in the "beta"? If that was supposed to be a taste of the game, I feel like I just tasted... water? There are so many buttons and mechanics that appear to be depth, but none of them were used in the section of the game I played. It's genuinely hard to tell if you're just burying the lead way too deep or if the game is entirely fluff and no substance. Sid Meier once said "a game is a series of interesting choices", and by that logic, the only actual gameplay I did was on the planet surface when I choose which direction to survey based on risk and reward. That was... fine... but rather disappointing to wait 2 hours for only that.

Sure, no problem!

1. The Controls page on "How To Play", plus the explanation of heartbreak and ring-out is probably sufficient to get started. Maybe emphasize whichever win condition is what you should be trying to achieve, just to give some direction to gameplay. Keep it simple. "Here is what you are trying to achieve, and these are the buttons you can press to get it done"

2. I played Ash, got a couple matches into a Breakneck run, but didn't finish it. I understood the LMB button, that one was straightforward and satisfying. I saw there was some strategic value for using it to force opponents off the ring (I think I did this once), but in neutral it felt underwhelming, like I bump into them real hard but it felt like little was accomplished.. Had no idea what RMB or MMB were doing, and didn't see a place to double check mid run. MMB felt like it was just "hit harder while active" which wasn't terribly inspiring. RMB... yeah... reading the description now I would have never figured that out, and honestly I have no idea when that would even be useful.

Oh dw, I filled out the form. (speaking of, I'd appreciate it if you could return the favor for our game if you didn't already, it's normally linked at the end of the game so it's kinda missable)

Regarding characters, if you have one that's intended to be easy to pick up and play, you should really emphasize that. I just picked the first character in the lineup without reading, I didn't see how I could make an informed decision before seeing gameplay so I just picked arbitrarily. I can't comprehend what an ability does in context before I've seen the combat. Honestly maybe lock all the characters except one until they've been beaten them in Breakneck, or some other condition. Risk of Rain 2 for example only starts you with the 2 most straightforward characters out of the possible 20ish to not overwhelm with complexity. If I were redesigning the gameplay loop, I'd consider removing all or almost all the abilities from the characters entirely, and just have those distributed as roguelike perks. Put all that together and you can truly make it "learn as you go."

Came over to check this out because of the pretty well thought out feedback you left on my entry. And I have to preface with that because I must admit this really is not my kind of game at all: I find thirst traps really cringe, I generally dislike roguelites, and I've never owned a beyblade! Take some of this with a grain of salt, I didn't play a whole lot, this is my best attempt to explain why I bounced off the game on first impression.

I'll start with some stuff I liked. I am genuinely very impressed with your presentation. The game is very well put together, and your itch page is fantastic. Game feel is also pretty nice, lots of good effects and the impacts feel satisfying and strong.

I think I'm most struggling with the tutorial. For how incredibly remarkably simple the game actually is at it's core, you have soooo much text explaining every little detail. I don't need to read an essay about the different types of collisions, especially since there's some physical intuition behind it. I can figure that out as I go, you're depriving me of any possible "ah-ha" moments in gameplay where things click. And I don't understand why there were 10 panels of tutorial text for the Breakneck run when it seemed like the only thing I could do was click "enter fight". 

And at the same time I felt some things were incredibly under-explained. I didn't understand any of the "Remix" choices I was presented with. What does "grind that you started stores force, and throws you both apart when it ends" even mean? It's phrased so unnaturally. Most roguelike choices I've seen in other games are way more digestible, broken down by passive or active benefit, and usually quite simple but impactful, the complexity comes from the cumulation of choices, not all at once.  And the house rule I was shown reads "Placed control geometry is drawn for everyone and holds a little longer, so the encounter reads as a command structure rather than a surprise" those sure are some words. I don't know what any of that means. "placed control geometry"? "command structure"? I saw little rings appear on the field, but nothing seemed to indicate what they did.

I'm of two minds about the actual gameplay. On one hand I do think it's kinda fun to control and play around with the abilities and the influence, watching the tops spin about, thinking about positioning and momentum. But on the other hand it feels like I'm barely doing anything at all, like things are just kinda flying around and happening and I'm not really in control, I'm just kinda mildly influencing things. I mean it's not like a traditional fighter where you have attacks, every time you are clinking with your opponent they are clinking with you too. It just felt like a game where I clicked some buttons for visual dopamine. And the abilities were difficult to wrap my head around, like yeah of course I'll press the do more damage button. Do we need 3? Is the random clinking of spinning tops strategically demanding enough to warrant having 3 different special moves that all just make you hit harder? I know it's more nuanced than that in reality, I'm trying to learn on the fly here and when I click the button and there's no immediately obvious effect, it just kinda feels flacid.

One more minor nitpick. There's a lot of information on the top bar during combat, stuff like HP and ult charge is probably up there somewhere... but I can't take my eyes off the battle arena to even look at it, there's not enough down time for that. Showing really critical stuff on the arena, maybe on the baes themselves would be a pretty big improvement to game state readability.

Anyways that's all I got, good luck!

Dude... I haven't even finished the tutorial and I'm being asked to wait 2 real world hours before I can keep playing? Did I do something wrong? Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally opposed to the idea of realtime waiting, but 99% of players giving your game a shot will just stop here. Players are not invested in your game by default, we need to be sold on it, you need to expose players to your "hook" early enough if you want us to keep playing... I'll try to remember to revisit this tomorrow, but only because I'm determined to actually rate your game, and honestly I can't say I've even played it yet.

Okay so this is intriguing. I played for about 20 minutes, but it's just totally overwhelming and I gave up. The level design is a disaster, you're exposing me to way too much information way too quickly, I can't process it! Within the first 5 seconds of gameplay there's a doll you can fall into, a random floating cat, some jumping dolls you can rope onto, something holding scissors, you can press Q to look into yourself... gah it's too much, I don't know what to even start with, I haven't even been given a goal or direction, so it's impossible to know if I'm making progress.

I would implore you to just start over on the level design, make an entirely new set of levels built with the express purpose of teaching the game, make it linear so there's always one obvious way to go. You don't have to "make a tutorial" you can use minimal words like you have, just dial in on one mechanic that you want the player to learn at a time. Riff off of Nintendo's 4 step level design method if you can: introduce an idea > develop it > twist on it > test the player (see the excellent GMTK video on the subject)

Many puzzle games I've played can take hours of teaching and reinforcing before even presenting the player with something they could conceivably get stuck on. Puzzle games are hard to design for this reason, because we as designers can't see our games from the perspective of a new player anymore. Try to swing the pendulum in the other direction, make it over-designed and then cut sections that prove unnecessary from playtesting. It's a lot better than people getting flustered and frustrated in the first 5 minutes.

I'm opening to revisiting the game if you make changes. Good luck!

P.S. I record my playtests, if you're interested I have the raw footage available unlisted on YouTube. Keep in mind I'm just a dev, I don't have a lot of practice giving live commentary, I do better at organizing my thoughts in text afterwards.

Edit: I just read your devlog where you said you redesigned the beginning room recently. I feel kinda bad now because I'm pretty sure I'm played the new version, and I still got quite lost. I think I kinda see the vision though? I was supposed to fall into the big doll which immediately presents the first challenge to escape. It didn't work out that way at all for me... but at least now I see what was supposed to happen.

Hey thanks for checking it out! Yeah, I'm not totally happy with how the camera turned out, I'll have to come up with something more robust for a full release.

Hi! Thank you for checking out our game, I'm watching your playthrough right now and taking notes!

I can answer a few things now though:

• The glitch you were experiencing is just poor performance. The Godot engine struggles a bit at that part of the level if you're playing in browser. The audio getting messed up is a side effect of the web version too (if you're curious, the web builds are single threaded so the audio processing is happening on the same thread doing everything, when one process chokes the others suffocate). The exe version has none of these problems, so it kinda slipped under our radar. I'm sorry you experienced these troubles, I'll see what I can do.
• The music is this one: https://pixabay.com/music/beautiful-plays-smooth-waters-115977/ the license is supposed to be permissive, this is the first time anyone reported a problem like that... and for only a very small portion of the VOD too, that's strange. You can theoretically use the linked Content ID license certificate to dispute any claims, although I have no idea what that process looks like for Twitch, it was primarily designed for YouTube videos.

Thank you for the kind words! I would love to see the VOD once you have it, 10 minutes is pretty quick relative to my other playtesters, you must've taken to the game pretty well, that makes me happy :)

We will probably add an angle guide in an update, enough people have asked for that so I clearly underestimated the qol benefit of it, oops.

Having hold to swim on a different button sounds pretty reasonable too, I'm kicking myself for not thinking of that on my own. But I probably won't sit down to figure that one out until we have more levels to play in. Expanded underwater sections are on the drawing board anyways, so it'd go right along with that.

As for the window being cut off... I'm honestly not entirely sure what you mean by "cut off", but I guess I can't reproduce that one since it looks normal to me. Might be desktop resolution specific? The window is resizable, but the game is locked to 16:9 ratio, so for example if you have a 16:10 monitor it would add black bars to the top and bottom if that's what you mean. Oh and Alt+Enter should work to fullscreen the game, I don't advertise it because that also hides the all important close button and I haven't added an in game quit button yet, but it's a fairly common key combo regardless.

Edit: Oh... I think I get it, you have a 1080p monitor, the game loads in a 1080p window, but the OS prefers to nudge the title bar into view, so the whole game gets shifted down by a few pixels on load. Yeah... the maximize button should fix that too, but I'll think about a way to make that better, probably just a godot configuration option I can set somewhere.

This was fun, a little rough, but fun.

I think the game is mostly lacking in clarity, it's missing a solid help menu or tutorial to explain things like upgrades, coins, weapon types, so I'm left to my own devices to work things out... Apologies for the wall of questions, you don't have to answer them, mostly just things to think about including in a future tutorial

• I still don't know what coins do, is it just rerolls?
• Why do I collect 2 diamonds to be rewarded with an item that just spawns on the ground sometimes? Is it more potent? It feels like it should be important.
• What causes upgrades to get unlocked in the first place? It felt random.
• Why do I press U to open the upgrade menu and Space to open the reward menu? Why aren't they the same button? Or better yet, why not just open it automatically? If there's some strategic reason to defer an upgrade, I have no idea what it would be.
• I also don't understand how the visibility system works? I usually can't see zombies that aren't in the circle, but sometimes I can? and sometimes they look faded out? Is it supposed to do that, or is that a bug?
• Are the guns upgrades or just side-grades or preference?

As far as other loose suggestions go, maybe make a slight visibility bubble around Kitten too? Perhaps we can somewhat control Kitten as well, like with wasd to move them around a bit? That could add some more mechanical depth, let you kite enemies around, maybe you need to explore to find more powerups. Maybe instead of switching guns on click you can unlock new guns to switch between anytime like an arsenal, perhaps even with different ammo types of varying rarity if you want to go that route.

I dunno, lots of directions you can take this, it's a very solid base to develop from.

Good luck!
p.s. I recorded my gameplay, if you feel seeing someone's unfiltered experience would be useful to you let me know and I'll publish it

Not exactly my prefered game speed, but decided to check it out anyways.

I usually try to give actionable feedback, and I'll do my best, but it's entirely possible it's just not for me. It's cute, it's quirky, it's polished enough... but is it fun? ehh... for a little bit, sure... but not enough to hold down an entire game. It might not actually be that far off though, at least for a shorter title.

Catching fish one after another to fill out a single checklist on a seemingly endless list starts to feel like work. What feels missing is a progression curve. Your best teacher would be a game like Dredge. Yeah it's a fishing game, but it's the context around the fishing that matters, the story, upgrading your boat, traveling to new areas, discovering new fishing spots, doing quests, etc. You could add at least some of that stuff, for example:

• make the pages themselves unlockable so you're excited to earn new things
• diversify the upgrade system: what if instead of one fishing rod upgrade path you had different options? some better suited for different fish? maybe have an option that speeds up the animations but increases rarity, so like a skill choice. Agency over decisions like that can make people more invested.
• perhaps add special "boss" fish that have really long catch sequences, give people something to look forwards to.
• instead of bait being about rarity, maybe there are just different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish?
• perhaps some more dynamicness to the fish variety, like a time of day mechanic

There's lots of avenues for fun new ideas that hopefully won't break your game's identity.

Some more minor hiccups I notices:
Try a more handwritten looking font, it'd suit your style better than the clean one you have now
The Slippery and Zigzag rings don't look intentional, I thought my game lagged, maybe the animation should never fully stop?
The audio break at the music loop point is distracting

Keep at it, and good luck!

Thanks! There is a quick respawn button (select button or R key), but I've seen a few playtesters miss the tutorial prompt for that, so that's something to work on I suppose. When we shift to working on the non-jam version I'll be sure to have a more robust system in place too.

Very ambitious trying to make 3 boss fights for a 2 day game jam. I found it pretty charming and full of personality. But the gameplay... yeah it's not great. The movement of the player character is slow and floaty, and the controls confuse my fingers.

The first boss is actually kinda decent? 3 attacks, all pretty learnable and kinda interesting, I only found it frustrating that I'd frequently try to jump over the swipe but the jump is so slow and floaty I'd get hit by the hitbox anyways.

Boss 2 is a mess mostly because my brain can't process the jump aim and shoot button being 3 nondescript buttons next to each other. Also I have no idea how to react in time when he speeds up. I'd seriously strongly recommend a more conventional control scheme for this, maybe twin stick on a gamepad or using the mouse to aim and shoot and wasd to move and spacebar to jump.

Boss 3 I can't even comment on, if you buy the upgrades he just dies instantly.

As a side-note I'm a bit bummed to see no other comments here, you clearly put a lot of energy into this. I can tell you that probably a fair amount of people are simply unwilling to download a game when trying other game jam projects. Godot should allow you to do html exports, you should make use of that.

Wow this is impressively polished, and one of the best titles I've played so far. I have some comments, but honestly besides the first one these are all really minor.

• I somehow got into a broken game state on level 12 where I fully balanced everything but had some extra animals. I spent like 10 minutes trying to figure out how to cram them in, only to later hit reset then redo my exact solution (I screenshotted it so I'm sure) but this time I didn't have extra animals... so idk what happened with that, animal duplication glitch maybe?
  
• The "order" in which the scales balance is kinda weird. Didn't really trip me up but I could imagine someone scrapping their correct solution too early because the top balance shows red for a few seconds before it even starts to swing into place. 
• There's also a slightly annoying thing that can happen where the scales dip below the animal palette and you can't click on the placed animals anymore.
• Some in game way to annotate the animals would be kinda nice, cuz honestly I just found myself brute-forcing a lot of it. Definitely out of scope for a game jam, but something to consider going forwards. i.e. if the subgoal is to identify the weights of all the animals, it'd be nice to have an in-game way of keeping track of what you learned.
• Lastly, not a criticism of what you've made here directly, but it kinda feels like you explored the entire idea-space already. What I mean by that is... if you want to develop the game further, you'd definitely have some work to do to figuring out how to get more content out of the mechanics.

Okay, I got a fair amount to say now. First about me getting stuck... actually I'd say most of what you described was pretty clear, there were just a few missing pieces that left me incapable of filling in the gaps. First was that the container didn't matter, which was probably the most helpful thing in the How To Play to point out. The second thing was specifically the little icon with the partially full triangle beaker. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, I kept looking around the room for a beaker to fill up or something. (I now understand that this basically means "1/2", but I only got there through trial and error.) If I'm being honest you can probably just remove that prompt as an option and it'd be the simplest fix, maybe it can, but I never saw it come up other than in the obvious case where 1/2 a purple = a pink.

Anyways, enough of that, I can actually comment on the game now. I really like the idea, it's very creative and inspired! I think you could turn it into a really fun little game with some tweaks:

• First and definitely most important is the pacing, it took probably 2 minutes of gameplay before the requests got spicy, and a lot of that time was just waiting for new customers to walk to the window. Also the physics of moving things is really slow, like when dragging an object from one side of the counter to the other then I have to wait for it to catch up to my cursor.
• Second is that the scale itself is kinda jank. I had some difficulty trying to weigh out a bread-load of milk, I started by placing the pots on both sides of the scale, and tried to put the bread on one side, but it didn't register. I figured out a better method later, but my first method feels like it should have worked. So I was a bit surprised later when putting the pot on the cheese DOES work. But actually... I'm impressed you managed to get it working as well as you did in the time constraint, as I understand it, game physics engines can be kinda unreliable at precision stuff.
• Lastly is that depth perception is a real problem, I kept bumping things into each other because it wasn't obvious how close or far I was holding something, and my pours were very inaccurate. Some gamey drop shadows would probably help, but if I were to make a really spicy suggestion, I would say it should be a VR game... (okay for the game Jam, that would have admittedly been insane to even attempt, but I still think it'd be perfect as a VR game.)

I hope the feedback is helpful, but keep in mind I still had a good time playing! The physical comedy of the whole game is quite amusing, and you got quite the chuckle out of me the first time a customer asked me for a measurement of milk expressed as a math formula of random objects, really underlines how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Has a really nice game feel, sounds very nice too, very crunchy, I really enjoy it! A bit repetitive on the easy difficulty... and when the rng forces you to wait because the platforms synchronized on opposite ends of the screen, or if a rock spawns above the spring you need to use to progress, those little things hurt the pacing, but it just needs a bit of ironing is all. Got a score of 1195 on Medium... I would've liked to try Hard, but yeah it's bork.

Unfortunately I feel like the "no text" challenge is really hurting your game, I can not figure out what to do. Was able to fill 2 orders, but beyond that I got stuck really quickly. The only feedback I'm getting from the customer is :( which just leads to trial and error. I don't feel like this is supposed to be the challenging part either. If you can provide more clarity I'd give it another shot.

Ah, yeah, I just had to turn my volume way up, even so the laser noise and music are still quiet relative to the other sounds, definitely could be punchier.

And I did manage to grab the egg on a rerun, it was not easy. I kept trying to use the tongue-retract momentum to loop up and over, but it rarely worked the way I wanted. Instead I managed to get up from the right side checkpoint with a well spaced swing. I felt maybe I could've used the box to do better, but it got kicked somewhere I couldn't reach, and respawning doesn't reset it's position. Actually I wanted to double-back to get it on my first run, but was held back because the final obstacle can't be traversed backwards. But the fact I was motivated to come back later and try again is a testament to your game's quality.

Excellent concept, very well executed too. I'm a big fan of the twist you put on the main mechanic near the end, that was delightful. The "swinging" is definitely a bit undercooked, but it's something you can get used to and for a game jam it's quite functional.

As far as suggestions go, the visual clarity needs some work: maybe try darkening the background tiles so it's easier to tell what is a wall or floor and what's just decoration; and I had a hard time at first differentiating what you can grapple and what you can't, maybe you could put a little sparkly animation on the grapple points to make them really pop off the screen.

Yes, I finally found another entry that made a game about a scaled animal climbing stuff!

Seriously, this is fantastic though, best entry I've played so far. Some sfx and music, maybe tighten up the collision physics a bit and you'd be golden; but as far as progress in 48 hours goes this is very impressive, I think you prioritized very well.

Now if only I could figure out how to get that 4th egg (are they eggs?)

Thanks! Yeah I wanted to make one that shows the first little bit of your travel arc but alas, time constraints.

Oh I did! I played a good 30 minutes before falling down like 500 meters and lost my motivation to make it to the top... but I had fun while doing that. By game jam standards, I'd call that pretty engrossing.

Very unique concept, really cool... a bit frustrating for my tastes tbh.

If I could make a suggestion, I imagine your "shoot" code is doing something like:

velocity = charge_time * normalized_direction * MAX_VELOCITY

...if that's how it's implemented, this might explain why it feels kinda physically unintuitive... for example if you shoot straight up your kinetic energy converts into potential: ½mv² = mgh, solve for "h". Basically you gain height in proportion to the square of the velocity. So if the above really is your code equation, doubling the charge time means you launch four times as far. Which is why there isn't much differentiation on the lower end of the charge.

Instead you want it to be energy based, something like:

energy = charge_time * square(MAX_VELOCITY)
velocity = sqrt(energy) * normalized_direction

Well... either all that, or it doesn't work like that at all and I'm just bad and coping. :P