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Hello Mark, that's awesome to hear, thanks for telling me! :-)

Hello!
Thank you for all the praise, it really is good to hear that you enjoyed my game! I spent a lot of time thinking about my level progression and am obviously thrilled to hear that it has paid off. Your stream was a real pleasure to watch, getting to see what people struggle with and what might be a tad too easy is highly useful, and seeing people experience those "Aha!" moments is such a joy. 

Re. feedback:
* Progressing the ambient audio within an episode is a very interesting idea... could provide some auditory variation essentially "for free", since I already have a bunch of ambient noises I use uniformly within each episode. I will almost certainly do something like that. 

* I'm glad the colors didn't pose a problem, but you mentioning the problem reminds me that I have a situation where it could have become a problem later in the game, but now that it's top of mind I can easily design around that using shapes in addition to color.

* The game save system is prepared for having "profiles", but an actual profile system hasn't been implemented. Thanks for mentioning it, helps me prioritize!

* My choice of tech makes a mobile version slightly unlikely, at least in the short term, but one of the primary reasons I want to put this game on Steam is to make it available on the Deck, exactly for that couch experience.

Thanks for playing my game and for the feedback!

"I shared your game on the Supaplex Online Discord community"

Cool, thanks!

"to give me that "argh, this is hard....oooooh that is how, no way, neat" kind of reaction after playing."

That's awesome to hear, exactly what one wants when creating puzzles :-)

Do you have any questions about Abysm? Or feedback? This is the place!

Super cute game, and a great concept, I really enjoyed the "discover the rules" gameplay. There's this whole "fox/goat/cabbage" thing going on here, with the added two dimensional... dimension. This is an awesome start, the only things I can think of really are nits:

• The music is very appropriate but after the first 10 or so levels it does get a little repetitive, I think you just need more of it
• I found the controls a bit janky... they work fairly well but didn't feel super smooth... the move cancelling mechanic once you start dragging didn't sit quite well with me for some reason... I kept forgetting

So much potential for continuing here, I want to put puppies... in... paper bags I guess... why not?

Hello c64cosmin!
Thanks for your kind comment! I looked at what you're posting on BlueSky, looks really cool, that was an instant follow.

Yes, I played BD as a kid, and while there are many clones, I still think it's a bit of a forgotten corner of the gaming universe. A good 50% of the people who have looked at my game just have no idea what a Boulder Dash is, and that crowd is still heavily skewed towards slightly older and more experienced gamers.

As for play testing, I might very well take you up on that offer, I'm slowly inching my way towards a new release of the test version of the full game. If so, I'll obviously offer to return the favor :-)

Sounds you're on it, good luck! I don't have much in the way of qualifications, just like thinking about this kind of product design/user experience kind of stuff, so can't help you with the reading I'm afraid.

Hello again!

So, I took back my gamepad from the kid, discovered that I didn't quite vibe with the default bindings for an XBox style gamepad layout (having all the character controls on the left hand except the jump button, which had to be handled by the block control hand,  didn't work for me at all), but that was easily remedied. And indeed, the game was clearly easier to control this way, and I scored better. I still mostly felt stressed out, not achieving and kind of "flow". I think maybe the game should be way easier to start with in the beginner mode, the actual act of building the road ahead with blocks and jumping on it is actually kind of fun by itself, I don't know that you need the time pressure and adrenaline surge on top of that very quickly.

I did find myself with enough time to actually try and build some lines. There's a real feeling of urgency with building as quickly as possible to get away from the wall of death, and a slight mismatch with the need to construct lines that ultimately destroys your path forward. I think this is good, it makes for important choices.

I don't know that I quite like the way the lines shake as you approach 10 blocks, it does signal danger to the character, which is reasonable, but completing lines is mostly good, and signaling danger for that feels wrong. I would go for something less "stressful" to signal that. On the whole, I think a way for the preview (which is very useful) to clearly show that dropping the block there will indeed remove the line, would be useful. In Tetris it's very obvious when lines are full, with the walls being there... in this game I found myself not having the time to count whether I'll end up with 9 or 10  blocks, which is a crucial difference.

I did indeed look at the "how to play section", both before playing at all, and after playing a bit, at which point I found it more useful, having some frame of reference. And then again later to make sure I understood correctly. Thinking about it I might suggest that something akin to the "dev plays" video should probably make up most of the main menu? To get the player a general feeling for the "shape" of the game to make it easier to understand the actions the "how to play section" refers to. And somehow I missed the "10+" blocks to complete a line text, I think with the general number of... numbers on that screen... my eyes sort of glossed over that piece of information. I'd make it extra big and put it mid-sentence so that it can't be so easily skipped over as "something before the sentence".

I don't know if that was helpful, teaching this game is an interesting challenge.

Hard!
This game looks really neat, I dig this kind of glitchy art style, and it also sounds cool. 

It combines two games in a potentially interesting way, but while the block placing half of it is inspired by Tetris,it is also very much different enough that it I felt that I didn't understand it at all adequately (how do you remove a "line" when there's no well to fill?). If you then layer a platforming experience on top of that and a visual style which looks good but... sometimes makes it hard to read what is going on, combined with the fairly complex controls that follows from playing two games at once, you get what I felt: Confusion.

I watched the dev play and that  sort of confirmed two things:

• There is a potentially cool game here, for those that spend enough time
• Watching a good player play the game did make some things clearer, but for the casual observer it _still_ looks overwhelming

I think there is something to your game which good players can really enjoy, but you do have a problem getting people over the hump to where they enjoy playing, preferably within the first couple of minutes.  Some things that one could possibly consider:

• Can you, in a decently natural way, teach the block game separately? Then ask the player to start controlling the character once they feel comfortable placing blocks and the rules around that.
• Maybe one can start with no wall of death at all?
• Reduce the visual chaos early in the game and ramp it up as you go, making it easier for novice players to see while still preserving the visual identity.
• Tie more of the visual effects to player actions, i.e. use them as feedback.

In addition to the challenges above it should be mentioned that I have a slightly different challenge tied to my particular setup. I don't currently have have access to my gamepad, and my keyboard layout is non-standard in a way that doesn't work at all with the standard mapping (in a Kinesis Advantage way). I remapped it to be able to play at all, but when you don't know how to play properly it gets very hard to figure out a good keyboard mapping. 

I haven't mentioned the fact that from a technical PoV this game feels like a complete and polished package, it just works very well with no fuss, which is absolutely not something you can take for granted. So good job, if you just figure out how to onboard new players, I think you potentially have a winner on your hand! Good luck!

I'm also pleased that you feel that the number of levels in the demo is generous. I'm essentially thinking of the demo as the first episode of four, my Knee-Deep in the Dead if you will :-)

Hello Zflocco!
Thanks for your review, I'm really happy that you liked it! I also watched your linked YouTube video, so I will respond to that as well. 

• I saw you struggle with finding the restart button, just like essentially every streamer I've seen playing the game. Now, every time you restart the game through the menu, there is actually a little information popup in the lower right corner, informing the player about the existence of the restart hotkey. It is now quite clear to me that it's far too discreet, and while I've been trying to keep things clean by making it fairly small and transient, the next build will absolutely make that popup bigger and have it stay on screen for much longer.
• You're completely correct that I chose 'p' because I didn't want anyone to hit it by accident, same reason that it requires a double tap. But you're not the first streamer trying 'r', and henceforward I'll let the double tap be enough and add 'r' as a default.
• You managed to close on "story box" prematurely on the second level, while reading. The boxes closes as one moves far enough away from the point where they spawn, and the distance can be customized for each box to balance keeping it on screen long enough for reading, while making sure it doesn't feel annoying. I've extended that one.

It's really valuable to get any feedback, and it's hard to overstate how valuable it is to be able to watch someone play. Thanks a bunch!

Thanks a lot, those are very kind words!

Not every game genre can be for everyone, but while there have been a lot of Boulder Dash inspired games out there, I'm thinking that maybe some people might enjoy a modern take on the basic idea, with a little extra emphasis on story and atmosphere. And if not, I've certainly enjoyed building it!

And yes, there is definitively a wider variety of enemies and environmental hazards later in the game :-)

Hello! I didn't quite reach the end of the demo, but so far so good. I was never into JRPGs or RPG Maker, so I went into this with a fairly blank slate. I had fun for the while that I played, and so far I feel compelled to come back and keep on playing, so good work! The game worked well for me (although the installation was a bit of a mess, I did not have 7z installed and the game installed itself... somewhere, under the name of a company I hadn't bothered to remember), the interface felt a little archaic, which I assume is a plus given the type of game this is, and it was easy to use and fast to navigate during play. The music is pleasantly retro, the pixels are well done, if a little bit inconsistent between the crisp map and town graphics, and the aliased battle portraits. 

Most importantly the story so far is working for me... the dialogue was the right kind of brief, everything felt charming, and the humor made me smile on several occasions. Good work!

This has all the makings of a great party game! As a single player game the longevity might be a little bit limited, depending on what you enjoy. The AI is good enough for sure, but this kind of things just works better with competitors where the winner can lord their victories over the losers.

Not much bad to say here: the art is cool, the sounds+music nice, the feel is there, and on top of all that it is works well, so any criticism becomes nits and matters of taste. If there was one thing I'd personally like to see changed it would be the course design... I'd personally prefer courses with a bit more speed and flow, and a bit less random object collisions. I generally also agree with those who would like a bit more instructions+introduction, with a progression of levels that introduce new stuff, and a good explanation of the initial rush to grab a chair, which I never quite got the hang of. Can anyone grab any chair? How does that make sense when you get to choose your chair before the race?

All in all, a really solid entry, one of those that just feels like a complete game already.

Hello!

This game is really cute, has good music, and generally worked well for me. Feels like a solid entry. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels good... jumping and landing on another planet is satisfying and a good base for a complete game.

That's where things got a bit dicey for me:

• First times few times I just didn't get what I was supposed to do... but a few times lost in space later and I figured it out.
• But please make the death screen skippable, I want to be back playing... now!
• Then I learned to jump... and on my first delivery got eaten by a dog... those likely shouldn't be introduced until later in the game
• Soon I was jumping around like some sort of space ninja postal worker
• At which point I realized that the game just turns impossible very quickly, I always get a delivery which is just too far to make in time

So, there are some nice graphics, sounds, and moment-to-moment gameplay, so in general I think that's a very good start! But this game needs a better difficulty progression badly... set me up so I can jump around and deliver packages for at least ten+ minutes, then bring the variety... a limited jetpack maybe? Aliens? Black holes that alter your trajectory? Keep going!

It's a very green pong game, which mostly works. That last part isn't trivial, so it's a success from that point of view, and surely as a learning exercise. Good work! But to become an actual interesting game, that is worth playing for anyone else, it needs more. Some possible directions would be:

• Ball control, i.e. the ball bounces differently depending on where it hits the bat and how the bat is moving
• Different ball speeds depending on the same factors
• A more interesting control scheme, maybe with acceleration, or mouse control? 
• A more interesting AI that follows the ball. Can you think of a way to make it more "human", where it tries to follow the ball and anticipate where it will land but is prone to making mistakes?
• And if you can pull of a varied AI, maybe different characters to play against?
• More visual variety... different color schemes, particles effects, post processing effects, the sky really is the limit...

Good luck on your game creation journey!

Thanks for your review, I'm glad you generally enjoyed my game! That you like my art and the sounds I've cobbled together feels great, I'm a programmer first, and only dabbled a bit with 16 bit pixel art i my youth :-) 

The physic system is largely inherited from this general sub-genre of game, starting with Boulder Dash. It is generally completely deterministic (a boulder dropped on top of another one will always fall to the left, unless that side is currently blocked) as is fitting for a puzzle game, but it's true that it can be counter-intuitive, as is probably inevitable with all grid-based physics. My hope is that people will learn as they play, and that I can introduce it in a way that it never feels too frustrating.

As for "Explosive", well, the odd looking wall can be destroyed, and the monster can help... :-)

Fair question. I think one of the things that feels good about jenga i general, and your game in particular, is the "physicality" of it... the very act of moving the blocks just feels satisfying. I'd want to recreate the feeling of direct manipulation of the physical game as far as possible using the mouse, which probably implies dragging the blocks rather than controlling them with WASD. I can see the problem, but maybe constraining the blocks to only moving in the horizontal plane (same as with WASD) and then mapping the mouse pointer onto that could work? It would also leave the non-mouse hand to do camera panning and tilting during movement operations, which could come in handy. Or maybe WS could be used for vertical movement and AD for rotation around the up/down axis, to be able to perform a clean and careful extraction? I think this would need to be prototyped.

In general I believe that the feel of manipulation is probably the most important thing to get right with this kind of game.

Fun little game, I like the idea with the special blocks making it increasingly challenging.

Some notes:

• It's hard, could easily start of easier. And with a tutorial... you know... arrows and text... like "grab the blinking block", "move it away from the tower", "grab the sticky block", "watch it all fall to pieces".
• It's not particularly pretty, but more importantly... it doesn't communicate very well. Others have commented the outlines, and I agree, but I'd also add that the design of the block probably could be made to communicate the block's properties as well.
• It took me a little while to figure out that I need to move the blocks far enough away from the tower to get rid f them. This should probably  be mentioned at startup.
• Controls with mouse+keyboard are fine, but feel a bit... "gamey"? Could the act of removing blocks maybe be made to feel more "physical"? 
• Music fits well but I perceived them as repetitive fairly quickly.

There's potential here for a fun little time waster, I had fun playing it! I think the upgrades are a good direction for extending the basic game, but I think one could probably find quite a few more physical mechanics to extend the gameplay further. Good luck!

Made another tweak for better controls, this time one gets a similar small pause before continuing after doing a 180 while entering a tile. This means that it's substantially easier to turn around and just stop, without proceeding further back. I also increased the previously introduced pause time to 30ms.

I just released a new version of the demo which stops the player for 20ms delay before digging into a new dirt block. I tried a number of different lengths and can confidently say that for me 50ms it just too long. I might try to go to 30ms, but wanted to start with a more modest change and get it out there, after which I can play with the higher delay and see how it goes. I hope this helps adress at least part of your concern about the controls, but I will frankly need to get more testing done by others before I can confidently tell. I might also try to center the option to turn down the game speed, or even make a slightly slower default.

To complement this change I also modified both Avalanche and The Pale Queen, so that they require less digging overall. The Pale Queen was also modified to remove the need to blow up the wall, and thus the eye bomb could be removed, and is once again introduced later in the game, as originally planned.

Oh, and singular "deformity" obviously.

Once again, thanks! Feedback makes a better game.

Thanks a bunch for your feedback, it is most useful to get this kind of play testing. Don't feel obliged to read or even respond to the below, but if you enjoy this kind of thing, its a window into... how I think:-)

The physics are, as you suggest, what they are. Physics on a grid are inherently wonky, and later in the game there are puzzles explicitly based on learning some of the intricacies of that.

The controls however... I'm very sympathetic. You're not telling me something I don't know, instead you're doing something maybe even more important: you're reminding me of something I already know but have pushed aside. This is a fairly tough nut to crack:

• Digging is one of the small joys of the game to me, an inherently pleasurable action, more fun than traversing open spaces. Not the rote digging out of large spaces of course, but a more fun way to get from A to B. I think this is inherent in all digging games.
• Keeping dirt around also keeps the puzzles more open ended and open for alternative solutions, things like "set up the solution before executing it"
• This gets more important late in the game where I want to do more not to signal the solution 
• So, I don't want to remove a lot of the dirt
• A lot of the actions in the game are irreversible, and timing is important, so you're going to fail a lot... something I've tried to deal with in many ways, including by making the levels fairly short (as compared to many of the oldies which inspired this game), and the speed, including transition speeds, fairly high.
• So, I don't want to slow down the digging too much
• But right now digging is just as fast as moving, and that's clearly not working out for you... so something's gotta give.

I believe I will, as you suggest, play around with introducing a small delay each time you dig, giving you some time to release the controls. I will probably make it fairly small, but not unusably so, and provide an option to remove it altogether, or make it longer, in the accessibility settings. Then I just need to playtest and tweak until it feels right for me, and then find another You to check my math :-) 

I also clearly need to introduce the "eye bomb" prior to The Pale Queen, as has been previously suggested... the problem is that this likely means yanking a different level and... in my mind they all have a role to play. The eye bomb was a late addition to the level, to make it easier to get through the wall, which previously relied on hitting the regular exploding monster with a boulder, which was really easy to mess up... which was frustrating, since it prevents you from retrying the main event of the level. The eye bomb can just be dropped on the wall, which essentially removes that problem. But... thinking about that, I believe there is another route for me to take to solve this problem as well: remove the wall, and with it the need for the eye bomb! The original impetus for it is mostly gone anyway.

And if anyone liked the bomb... well, it wasn't invented for this level but sees plenty of use later in the game, where it was originally introduced.

Fun little game!

Well polished little package with very cute graphics, effective sounds, and a simple a satisfying loop. I liked this. The music is appropriately bouncy, but quickly gets repetitive.

I was a bit confused to start out, accidentally dug up my one little plot of dirt, and didn't know where to go from there, so I restarted, which was unnecessary. I then figured out how to buy stuff and from there it was mostly smooth sailing. I'm a dummy but I'm not very experienced with this kind of game.  Some things that I noted:

• The sprinklers were crucial for not going insane
• Would have been nice to have an overlay to show the area the sprinkler will cover when placing it, and covers when it's placed
• I figured out that holding shift can be used for selling everything of a good, but some +/- buttons akin to what's in the buy tab would be nice, because I didn't care for the sense of despair that the prospect of dragging the produce one-by-one into the slot instilled in me.
• I assume one wants to place the initial seeds under the lamp, but that area isn't large enough to place a sprinkler without some of it's capacity being wasted... very triggering.

It's a very nice start... now you just need more of everything :-)

I made a new release and while the player isn't more animated when moving around, still need to figure out how to do that, he does have a small idle animation, still inspired by your comment. Thanks!

Made a new release, the restart bug should be fixed. Thanks!

Made a new release with the release date changed and a fair reduction in ambient noise in TPQ. Thanks!

Yeah, dont get me wrong, I like the simple abstract style! I just think you'll have to work a bit harder to get the feedback going that comes naturally when you have large menacing dragon sprites :-)

Thanks for playing and your comments! The info boxes are an interesting nut to crack... the way they currently work is that they go away when the player get a certain distance (which is different for different boxes) away from where it was triggered. I did this so they would not go away while you're still reading the text, while staying unintrusive, and without introducing any kind of interaction button. You're not the first to notice that I havent gotten that balance quite right in all cases, in particular its easy to "miss" them when they trigger in an area where you are moving fairly quickly. I will obviously have to think about some way of improving on this.

Ok, I can't find too much to say about this one really, and that's a good thing.

Graphics are gorgeous, music is fitting, story is fun and well integrated, and difficulty progression is... spot on, where I was just frustrated enough for a little while and then felt clever when I finally got it. Overall, this is a finished product, a proper game, and I really enjoyed it.

Wishlisted.

Ah, sorry, I was confused because that's exactly how the existing "double tap p" mechanism already works, but you're saying that with that in place the danger of placing it on 'r' should be minimal. It's a good point... I'll consider making the change. Thanks for helping out, I really appreciate it!

Now I'm slightly confused. There is a a restart level hotkey, I might have misunderstood you, are you asking for a restart game hotkey as well? :-)

R would have made sense and I would have used it but I didn't like how close it is to the WASD keys I normally use when playing, I don't want to have people restart by mistake. The game does feature key rebinding if one would prefer it though.

Thanks for playing, and for sure, playing Boulder Dash as a kid was the main source of inspiration! I did focus on a slightly different kind of levels than the typical BD fare,  shorter and more single-puzzle oriented. I think that helps define this as its own thing with its own personality. 

Thanks for finding the restart count bug, I'll look into it asap! Might be related to restarting from the menu, that's not something I do.... ever :-) The game actually has a restart hotkey, on the keyboard it defaults to hitting 'p' twice. You should hopefully get a little hint about the existence of the hotkey any time you restart from the pause menu. I will think about how I can improve the communication around this further.

This was a neat little platform game, nice job!

I played the browser version and it worked well. It got harder and very hectic quite quickly, I could have done with a little bit of a more gradual challenge. I started with the tutorial but found that it was fairly tedious and introduced way to many concepts far too quickly, so I bounced and didn't come back for a couple of days.  I then started the actual game and discovered that the tutorial was largely unnecessary, it has a story element and introduces at least the first power-up in a good way... so I'd just skip the tutorial altogether and add hints into the game itself... including basic controls. Making the game the tutorial has the advantage that you don't overload the player with stuff they can't relate to just yet, and the basic jumping and running around of this game is standard enough that you don't actually need a tutorial to start playing the first level.

The graphics look good, although possibly a little... disconnected? Like nice sprites that don't quite gel into a cohesive whole. And the loading screen dragon looks quite different, not as detailed. But overall it looks nice, and controls decently, and the power ups feels like they enhance the game since it plays quite differently while you have them. The sounds effects work well, but the music though... it is fairly harsh and gets very repetitive very quickly. Not a fan.

I did enjoy my time with this game until the music (and lack of time) forced me out, keep going with this!

I liked this game, and once I got into the rougelite/run structure of it, the difficulty curve also started to make sense.

The graphics are simple but effective, with a clear color palette. Though more juice (glow, bounce, intros, outros...) would probably make the game feel cooler still, lots one can do within this general minimalistic style.

I agree with previous comments on information communication... it's not always obvious what upgrades will do... the whole concept of "upgrades" being the word for the in-battle hex modification wasn't obvious to me, since it could also refer to the between-game improvements. And also the state of the game... it felt a bit "amorphous" to me... where it was hard to quickly identify what the important features are. I think this is partly a risk with the minimalist style... that's one of the jobs those big black dragon graphics might do in a fantasy themed game, drawing your eye and make it immediately obvious that you need to focus on them. I think your game might need to solve that same problem in some other way.

Is there a way to do upgrades et al without using the keyboard shortcuts? Because I think there should be, even if it's suboptimal for an actions-per-second PoV.

All-in-all though, this is a game with clear potential... might need improvements in the presentation, and more features, to make it feel more like a complete package, but I believe the bones are there and work well! I had fun while playing it, and that's a very good start.

Hey Diabolodev, thanks a lot for your comments!

• 'Hex' - nope, but if it gets you there... I suspect something like that is actually the fastest way to beat it if that's what you're optimizing for
• 'Avalanche' - in my mind it is sort of about that, the occasional need to do prep to solve the puzzle... but now that you mention it... I will look for a way to make it feel less onerous...
• 'The Pale Queen' - i hear you, I've worked a lot on getting TPQ as good as I can, bosses and puzzles aren't an easy combination, so all comments are useful for finding the direction for future tweaks... but the sound should be easy to improve upon, thanks!
• Good catch with the release date, I'll fix it at once so it's part of the next demo update... and thanks for the Steam comment!
• The tool tip came about because essentially nobody would find the restart key otherwise, and you really need it...

I just uploaded a new version of the demo with Sinister pushed into the next episode, replaced by Móshì.  Also added a bunch more small but hopefully non-intrusive hints to the first few chambers... things like explaining chamber skips, and that one can turn on a chamber timer.

Thanks for the help!

This is a really polished and ambitious game. With lots of art, lots of content, and good music, it really feels like a complete game.

My first session was a bit confused, and the fact that it really looks like a phone game, built for a touch screen, with a UI that isn't fully intuitive on the PC,  probably didn't help matters. Neither did the fact that I don't have much experience with card games/deck builders. A bit more introduction would probably be a good thing... and having that extend into the initial battles to teach the ropes would be icing on the tutorial cake. 

I ended up really enjoying my time with the game though... gaining new cards and gear, playing them in battle, solving quests for the dear Auntie, and so on and so forth. I don't have much bad to say really, but a few nits maybe:

• I got a quest about transforming biomes, but had a hard time telling which biome was which, could be made clearer
• I got "[..] too far from your real body [...]" many times, and I assume that's related to the games nature as a mobile/ar-style game, but... I didn't understand what it was and what the consequences were.
• There was a fair bit of lingo I'm not familiar with and that I didn't find an explanation for... things like "consumable cards"... those are lost if you lose in combat, but... which cards are consumable?
• The game occasionally tried to squeeze more information into a small space than what would be legible.
• "Disencorage" should be spelled differently

Hugely ambitious game, impressive stuff.

Hello! Thanks for playing and for your review, very much appreciated!

Sinister is, despite maybe appearing so, not at all random, and for those who speak Latin (I certainly do not) the solution is actually in the name: "sinister" means "left" in Latin, and that's the direction the monsters that are present in this maze always turn. Thus they rotate around the maze in a clockwise fashion. That knowledge is what Sinister tries to test, but I don't want people to bounce off a level because they feel they are not in control, so I will certainly consider whether the level is doing that job well. I might consider making Sinister a smaller level, both to give the player a better overview of the monster movement, and to enable quicker iteration, thus making failures less frustrating.

All the monsters currently present in Abysm are "wall huggers",  exploring the space by constantly turning either left or right, depending on the type of monster. This is exactly for the reason you highlighted: puzzle games need to be deterministic. No monster will ever "chase" the player like they would in a typical action game. On a similar note, boulders always fall to the left if neither side is blocked. 

Another thing to note maybe is that if you get stuck on a level you can choose "Skip level" and move on to the next for the time being, this way one can work on a few levels in parallel, something that I know I need to communicate better.