Thanks so much! It was actually all made in about 3 days, 5-8 hours per day, I didn't hear about this jam until I got an email the Thursday before the deadline. I've been using Gamemaker for nearly twenty years, since I was a little kid. Sprites were done in Aseprite with minor tweaks in the GM image editor, and music was mostly Bitwig.

I'm glad you liked it! It's clear it was way too difficult, at least in the early stages. I had this weird idea that the conveyor speed needed to be locked to tempo but I don't think it made a difference. The idea with rats is that it would cause you to sometimes drop stuff in the middle of the floor, so there would be areas that were impassible but still easily avoided until cleaned up, adding an extra little wrinkle, but it was clearly all just too much too fast. If I moved forward with this project I'd tweak that first - slow down the conveyor, give more empty spaces between parts, make rats less frequent (at least until the player shipped a certain number of signs and the difficulty bumped up - difficulty bumps now at shipping 3, 8, 14, and 20 signs but it seems right now the start difficulty is too high to notice!)

Inaccessible corners are an unfortunate byproduct of having corners at all, there's no non-awkward way of getting to them. I considered a couple solutions, making the corner bigger than the other conveyor spaces or analyzing inputs to try to guess which of the three spaces the player wanted, and in the end just went with making them inaccessible for the jam.

Blueprints though, I'd keep moving. I like that they basically have a time limit, but the player can get more time if they take a second or two away from doing something else, and that that task is the same thing they've been doing the whole time - moving items around on the conveyor belt.

Thanks again for playing! If you can play with someone else I'd recommend it, it's (in my VERY biased opinion) lots of fun and significantly easier. It becomes a game of communication between the two players, asking what parts they need or which blueprint this tube goes to. If I'm fortunate enough to win one of the prizes (doubtful, there are some fantastic entries, yours among them!) I plan to take a few months to really polish this up and release it as a Switch game, since the co-op works so well (again, IMO)

EDIT: Also, this it NOTHING like the actual process for making neon signs. For that I'd recommend another really good entry, Lam's Untitled Neon.

Thanks so much for the feedback! Difficulty is always hard to get right in jams, what with nobody testing except me and my partner, and it's compounded by my own tendency to err on the side of too difficult. My goal was for everything to be a little hectic - the machine takes just enough time that you can squeeze in another task while it's running, but by then you might have forgotten which blueprint the tube goes to - but only shipping one sign is definitely too hard!