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Of course! I think I had the same bug that someone else mentioned, just now I had to restart 3 times to get them to pull together. That first playthrough I was stuck for 10 minutes trying everything I could think of before giving up and thinking I just didn't understand the puzzle.

This attempt was going well until I realized all of the sides were getting filled in and... yeah I wasn't able to get the last one on haha. 

Honestly, I really liked the idea of this and I enjoyed the atom and ship levels. The fire level I feel like it takes a bit too long to cook the fish, I was wondering if the game was broken or if I was doing something wrong until it suddenly completed (maybe I was doing something wrong but managed to complete it anyways?) And obviously I struggled the most with the space level. The precision + the damn asteroids... that was rough.

I really appreciate the level select. If not for your comment and that, I wouldn't have tried replaying it. That was a nice ending cinematic :]

Ok, I have a short answer and a long answer. 

Short answer: Personally, I think I would rather just have the notebook from the beginning rather than it appearing later.

Long answer:

I think it comes down to a few key aspects for me. The first is that this these aren't words made of letters in specific orders. The ingredients could be in any order, it's like if you played wordle but the letters were scrambled. So rather than wordle, structurally this seems to be more like mastermind (the game that inspired wordle). With mastermind, the combination is 4 colors long with 6 possible colors. You also get a lot more guesses. The key difference of mastermind is that you get the "green/yellow/grey" info but not corresponding to each slot. So wordle gives more info, but also has more possible answers.

Having the feedback of what ingredients are correct and what are correct but in the wrong place is great so that if you can't figure it out from the clues then you don't have to just brute-force it, but not knowing what you previously tried & the info gathered from that basically takes it back to brute-forcing. Plus the chance of re-guessing something you guessed already (which happened a lot to me). Additionally, wrapping back to the wordle vs mastermind thing, wordle is limited in scope because not everything is a word. Sure, it has a longer sequence of characters and there's a lot more possible letters, but those letters have to be in specific places with specific combinations. With something like mastermind, or this, it's exponential. The longer the sequence, and the more possible components, the larger the amount of possible answers is. Mastermind has 6^4 = 1296 possible combos. Wordle, assuming any space could be any letter, would have 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible combos. The english language limits that to around 13,000. (And they curated that further to ~2,300 possible solutions.) Your game, on the last potion, has 6,720 possible combinations. (it would be 32,768 if ingredients could be added multiple times. Which could be a fun exploration of like more "concentrated" amounts of things in potions because the ingredient gets put in multiple times? Dangerous idea though if it turns into a guessing game...) 

Anyways, the tools you have provided the player to swing the odds in their favor are the clues and the wordle colors. If the clues aren't enough to get them most of the way there, the wordle colors have to do the heavy lifting. In those circumstances, making the player remember all of their past attempts could be frustrating rather than fun. Is this supposed to be a memory game? Or at least, how much of a factor do you want memorization to be? This also all depends on the balance you want to strike between deducing from clues and deducing from past guesses.

Okok now to some other potential solutions off the dome, some of which could go together:

1. Better clues.
If you can get like 3/5 green from just the clues, guessing is easy from there. It's the yellow that are hard, especially without remembering previous guesses.
I would vote for potion names/descriptions to be adjusted rather than the images since it's probably easier for you and it leaves more nuance in the interpretation of said clues. For example, the first potion that says "Shine off the poison" could be interpreted as star then a poisonous thing because that's the order that the words are said in, or star last because it says shine "off", implying action happening later. Heck, shine could even be lightning or unicorn horn depending on how evil you're feeling.

2. Stop the player from guessing something they have previously guessed.
Just say like hey, you already tried that.

3. Make it optional.
Up for a challenge? No notebook mode.

4. Let the player have control over when to continue after guessing.
So they can spend as much time as they need to memorize it. Or take notes/screenshots if they want to.

5. Give the ability to take notes in-game.
A little book you can draw/type in! This could be cute. Or annoying if they have to guess a lot and therefore take a lot of notes, in which case a straight up list of previous guesses might be better.

6. Add some rules to the ingredients.
This might be changing the game too much, but just an idea. Lean a little more into the wordle aspect (as opposed to mastermind). Let the player uncover rules as to the order. In this route, maybe the wordle colors aren't needed at all if the order can be figured out solely from rules learnt previously, and the potion title/desc just has to clue in to the ingredients... For example: fuzzballs can't be added right before or after lightning because they'll generate too much static charge and the potion will blow up. Or: gears have to be added last or else they'll rust.

It's definitely challenging to not make it too hard or too easy, and I think the only way to really figure out what works for you and your game is to just try different things and have people playtest it...... so exactly what you're already doing lol ^^

Sorry for the big wall of text, I am also by no means a good game designer (this jam was my first game too!), I just like puzzles :)

Thanks! Yeah, unfortunately no music. I tried making some but it was so bad that I decided the game was better without it haha

I'm such a puzzle/word game freak so this is right up my alley. I agree with the feedback that the order of words in the description is confusing, it seems like you have to deduce almost purely based off of the background instead of the description (which sometimes leads astray.) The wordle aspect does really help with this thankfully. Also being able to take ingredients back out is great.

The biggest thing to add would be a list of past attempts, I continuously forgot what I had already guessed, especially in the later levels.

For bonus points here's my interpretation of all of the potions, based off of the title/desc:

• Woodland Cleanser "Shine off the poison": Toadstool + Star (Star after because 'shine off') (Why is there shine if not star?)
• Swirl of the Lightning Bird: Had the two ingredients swapped due to the word order
• Funsponge Tonic: Lighting + Nightshade + Fuzzball (Again, word order)
• Get2Work Brew: Gear + Fuzzball + Feather + Nightshade? (Why is star dust if "no magic"?)
• Essence of Flight: Everything but the unicorn horn, most in wrong order coz order is not specified (all the ingredients in this make sense to me except for the horn)

Really cool idea and super professionally executed! The art and audio are so charming. I did struggle with the camera and maneuvering behind the particles/throwing them as well as keeping track of which atom I was working on, though maybe that's just a skill issue haha. Not sure if it's a bug but sometimes I was able to move the camera while holding on to an electron (which actually made it a lot easier) though it seemed  to also throw it less far / sometimes I traveled with the electron attached to me? It also seems like the electron travels in the direction I'm facing rather than where I clicked, so combined with my not-great positioning it caused them to get sent off to the wrong place and add reactivity :[

My high score after 4 attempts was 1130 (i think)
A casual mode of this with less reactivity gain & less atoms might be fun, I found myself just wanting to make one really really big :]

I got stuck on the space one idk what the goal is :(

When it zoomed out and the water was all black and the stones were like baby jellyfish swimming in the deep abyss of the ocean I felt like I was witnessing the miracle of life being born

Then it zoomed out further and the stones were stars collapsing in on themselves and the weight of the universe was suddenly tangible and I felt like I was witnessing death itself

Great game. Existential crisis is only a stone's throw away

The most addicting carpal tunnel simulator I've ever played. Genuinely had to cut myself off at lvl 220, extra coin + wall bounce = ADHD trap...

I think the difficulty is fine, it's hard at first but a few well-timed upgrades makes later waves trivial. After a certain point it seems like enemy scaling maxes out.

It would be nice to be able to adjust the music/sfx volume.

step 1: buy money printer
step 2: repeat step 1
step 3: spin to make asteroids hit earth instead of printers
step 4: profit and watch the world burn

Selling old chips for money would be great!
I got to round 11 then died because it rolled red every time... 'tis the life of a gambler.

Fun! I had trouble understanding how it worked at first, like the rules say to press "ok" but the button is a checkmark (that tripped me up for longer than I'd like to admit) and the fact that you have to press it multiple times wasn't clear. Maybe in if there's a future build you could add text to say what "phase" it's in? Like buying, betting, etc.

I think I cheesed it since you can keep putting bets on the same spot, just in increments of 20. So betting on even/odd and doubling money every round haha. I got to 120 and then it crashed? At least, it's not accepting any inputs.

If this was longer I could totally see getting addicted to it.

I really enjoyed this one! I feel like I'm a guardian angel protecting my little boat friends :] Honestly, I like the pacing. It's really relaxing. It's awesome that the boats can turn right before they collide, so any collisions feel like my mistakes rather than being frustrated at the boats.

The biggest improvement imo would be optimizations.

I did struggle sometimes with the rescue boat when I had multiple wreckages since I would send it to one then have to guide boats nearby a different wreck, illuminating it in the process, and causing the rescue boat to go there instead of continuing to go to the first one. I think this could work well since it's another little skill thing (to avoid lighting up a wreck that you don't want to save yet) but it would help if the rescue boat was a bit faster so there's a little more leeway for accidental flashes.

Also, idk if it would take away from the visuals but some people might want a counter of boats saved if they're trying to beat a high score rather than having to die first to see it. Though honestly I think I like it without.

Music/sound would add a lot too, if that's feasible. Some simple ocean waves or wind?