A very big thanks for the detailed feedback and of course, playing!

I'm surprised and delighted to hear the some people are actually complimenting the music. I would very much regard myself as a total rookie in that department so glad I managed to scrape up something that even resembles music and isn't just straight up annoying.

Compared to audio stuff, visuals comes naturally for me. But isn't all art just basic shapes though? :D No matter how detailed and photo realistic pen drawing there is, it's just a bunch of lines. Seriously though, I do all my "art" stuff in Illustrator so basic shapes is the way to go. Especially like in this game case when I only worked on a laptop touchpad.

Quite often I even try to get as far as possible with just using the default circle/square sprites of Unity. For example, this little dude has only two extra sprites, the cloud he is standing on and the mouth (which is also just a segment of a circle and hence wouldn't even need an own image if just masking a circle with a square).

But yeah, I have been toying around of maybe trying a more hand drawn style in some jam game. Might be fun, I haven't really drawn anything except for some super sketchy doodles to pass the time sometimes in like 15 years.

Yeah, the engineers weren't really supposed to be that prone to dying. They actually were immortal unless hitting their head for quite a long time. Then I added the system of the being able to get crushed by the doors and that system leaked "a bit" to fire up in the minor overlap in the normal collisions too. But at that point I had already played the game so much that the additional difficulty spike was maybe not unnoticeable, but a welcome change. And it is most likely the reason behind launch deaths when either using too much force or there are body bits raining down. As a hindsight it would have been super easy to add a threshold of some small amount of time the overlap would need to happen before the death was triggered. I will most likely do a quick post jam version where I'll fix all these annoying issues at last.

And then to the performance bit. What sort of computer did you play on? The garbage collection kicks in at 10 dead bodies or 15 overall engineers, live or dead (expect exploded first before collection if still alive). I coded the game on a not that new macbook and it was maybe something closer to 50 engineers when the framerate started to dip (below 60 that is). And that is what I based those picked garbage collection values on. Well, now that I think about it, that was quite a lot before I added up quite a lot of more details like the animated tree leaves and so on. Dunno how much they actually affect the performance really though. But yeah, after adding the limits, I didn't encounter any poor performance even when playing inside Unity where it usually is a lot slower than the actual builds.

Again, big thanks for the feedback!

No, they do not get stronger. The key to doing launches consistently is to keep the length and angle the same. Since the "ball" here is a ragdoll, even very slight changes can have some drastic effects. 

The launch force is linearly based on the length of the line and I balanced the "normal" forces to be what ever looked like the most natural to me. Obviously this enables some ridiculously high forces when going for the max distance. The higher forces do have their uses too even if they will kill on contact with anything. Somehow limiting the launch force to disallow higher forces would be stupid, think of a golf game where the power meter was the exact thing for a hole in one.

Also, destruction is fun (to me at least)! Extra deaths aren't really punished at all, the stars are pretty much only there for bragging rights. One will most likely easily earn 2/3 stars by accident to be able to skip even a third of the levels if needed.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, as a hindsight it would have been super easy to add a system where a message pops up if you launch few times too hard on the start. The tutorial/message system was in place for exactly cases like these but this one somehow slipped my mind.

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

Thank you so much for playing and leaving such a detailed feedback!

Very glad to hear you enjoyed the music. I'm still very novice in that department but I'm trying. Audio is easily the weakest category for me. The graphics just come naturally, juicing up games is probably my favourite thing to do. And I do programming for a living (even though looking at the spaghetti code I ended up creating for this game, one probably wouldn't notice).

Some kind of cohesive plot to tie the levels together (and have more of them overall, or at least better designed ones) would have been cool. Alas, it was kinda out of scope since I decided to work super casually on this. Probably like max few hours a day and I even kept several days off completely. So I don't know if I even ended up working that much more on it than on "normal" weekend jam games.

Ok, I'll be lazy and copy paste my answer from below...

The launch explosions happen when launching too hard to when there is some rubble (ie. fallen comrade body parts) raining down. One of the "bugs" I never got around to fixing.

Thanks for playing and the kind words!

Haha yeah, dunno, I never actually graduated as an engineer so I wouldn't know. :D But yeah, they probably were not supposed to explode that much but since physics can get weird I just went with it and let them die when there is some overlapping with the walls, too big collision forces or limb snapping which ended up resulting in quite a lot of destruction. And it probably doesn't help that I was the only person playing it during the development and got good/careful at plaing it. It's hard to make easy games :D

Thanks for giving it a go and leaving feedback!