Hey SecretPocketCat, thanks for the review! The angle of the camera was definitely something I went back and forth on. I too struggle with messing up Left / Right and with the player character facing Left->Right across the screen for most puzzle’s there’s an implicit 90 degree rotation you have to do in your head. I ended up leaving it because a) in most games the character goes from Left to Right, it’s an intuitive goal for players and b) the finish tile was more easily visible in most levels from a side on angle. I think I’ll make this a configurable option post Jam as once you have all 4 commands the starting orientation of the player doesn’t matter mechanically. Perhaps being able to issue commands with WASD/Arrow keys might also help.
As for the brute forcing, I definitely feel the same way for some of the later levels. I wanted even the complex levels to have at least one simple, but inefficient solution, and hoped the alacrity goal would drive people towards finding the faster solution after discovering the simple one. There is one level “Spinors” which is intentionally so complex with all the spinning pieces that brute forcing its 2 command solution was kinda intentional, I didn’t consider that it might have a demotivating effect on people given it’s right at the start of the rotating pieces puzzle section.
I think as you pointed out, a step debugger is really needed once the rotating pieces are introduced as the player moves so fast it’s hard to grok how the rotation and action plan are interacting. That and drag and drop I think are the biggest missing QoL features.