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Haha, that sure looks tricky! Adding that opening was probably the right call even if it enables my cheesy solution.

Congrats on your publishing your first game! I like the lore and how the voice of the god(?) taunts and encourages you as you walk along the path. Here’s some feedback/tips:

• Using free art is great but try to pick stuff that meshes well together. For instance, especially with pixel art, make sure things are scaled to the same resolution, so that there aren’t some pixels that are larger or smaller than others. Also keep an eye out for things like whether sprites are outlined or not, how thick the outline is, what colors they use, etc.
• The animation of the sword should match its hitbox. Right now you can kill enemies at a decent distance but the sword doesn’t look like it reaches them. That makes it hard to judge distance.
• The sounds are pretty good but some of the traps sound a little repetitive. One way to make them more varied without having to use multiple sound effects is to slightly randomize the pitch_scale of the sound each time it plays.
• It’d be nice if the game restarted after you die so you don’t have to reload the tab or relaunch the game. There’s an easy way to do this in Godot with get_tree().reload_current_scene().

Cool concept! It’d be nice if there was a better way to find the planets than wandering around randomly. Maybe a compass arrow or a sensor that beeps faster the closer you get? Also, sometimes you start orbiting a new object and immediately crash into debris. There was an asteroid on the way to the electronics planet was like that.

I suck at these kinds of games so I couldn’t finish it, but this is a neat idea! The loop theme is a bit of a stretch, but the standalone idea of a conveyor belt/factory themed Sokoban game is pretty cool.

There’s a bug where sometimes you walk onto the conveyor belt you’re trying to push. Might be a race condition? Also if the duck gets pushed into a crate by a conveyor, and then you push the conveyor, the duck seems to get stuck on the crate and you can’t push it.

Interesting concept and good execution! Some feedback:

• If you make an object big enough that it overlaps the top middle buttons on the UI, you can’t click those buttons - it counts as clicking the object instead. The layering should be the other way around.
• It’d be great if you could drag around objects that you place instead of having to delete and re-place them. Similarly, being able to duplicate placed objects would be nice.
• It’s not immediately clear what objects are interactive and which aren’t. Maybe use a different color or something to distinguish them.
• It feels little cheap to just be able to delete spikes and stuff. I think it’s a little more interesting to have to change gravity to get rid of them, for instance.
• “Best time” might not be as interesting a metric to track as “fewest changes to the level”. Or maybe assign a “score” to each block/change and try to get the minimum score? IDK.
• The direction squares are kind of unintuitive due to gravity. Not sure what can be done about that.
• Bug: if you place a direction square right where the player starts, it “falls” from the gravity perpendicular to that direction, and while it’s falling, it seems to be immune to spikes.
• A level counter (e.g. “Level 5/10”) somewhere on screen would be nice. I completed all the levels but there was a point where I thought it might go on for way longer. Similarly, a level select would be nice.

Great job overall!

P.S. I definitely found the intended solution to the final level:

Balatro on a piano roll is a cool concept! Creative interpretation of the theme too. I’d love to see this idea expanded on. Some feedback/constructive criticism in case you feel like working on this some more…

Gameplay:

• I don’t think permadeath makes any sense for this game, unlike Balatro, because there’s no randomness. If you lose, I don’t see why you should be forced to replay the first levels in exactly the same way just to retry the one level you failed on. Now, if you added some randomness, like choosing random instruments to unlock or random challenge modifiers or mandatory starting instruments for certain levels, permadeath might be justifiable.
• As you pointed out, the order of placement matters, meaning you can violate the rules if you just do it in the right order. This doesn’t really make sense, although I get that it’s easier to implement.
• I wonder if you could come up with better placement rules to encourage creating an interesting song. Right now it’s pretty flexible so you can kinda make whatever. I was able to cheese every level by spamming crash cymbals.
• Speaking of which, is it just me or are most woodwinds objectively worse than the hi hat and crash cymbals? I was afraid of using them because I thought I would lose (causing permadeath) so I just stuck to my dumb cymbal strategy.
• A free-play mode where you can just make a song would be fun.

The game could definitely use some quality of life features. I know it’s hard to justify squeezing them a jam game, but I figured I’d mention them. Think of these ideas as low-hanging fruit to improve the player experience.

• Option to fast forward playback (increase BPM).
• Button to skip to the next round once you’ve reached the target score.
• Save your song between levels (with a button to delete all if you do want to clear it).
• Left-clicking an instrument should automatically deselect the previous instrument.
• The instrument shouldn’t be deselected after placing it, to make it easier to place multiple copies of the same instrument. Or you could require holding shift or something for multi-placement. Right now it’s annoying to click the instrument, move the mouse to click the note space, and then move all the way
• There should be a way to restart the game/go back to the main menu etc.
• It would be nice if there was a preview to tell you for sure if you were gonna trigger the multiplier for placing an instrument. Sometimes it doesn’t trigger when I think it should or vice versa, which is especially painful when placing something expensive like a guitar.
• I kinda like how you made an unncessarily cool shimmer effect for the backgrounds.

Some bugs/random issues:

• You can place drums on row 1 of the “Woodwinds” area.
• On the first trumpet level, the drum preview sprites were way larger than normal?
• Guitars are considered woodwinds? News to me lol

You’re probably aware of a lot of these things but I just wanted to point them out in case it’s helpful. Cheers!

Probably too late at this point, but feel free to include EverSector: https://maugrift.itch.io/eversector