should be renamed to moaning with sticks simulator 5/5.
On a serious note though, Ive gotta say although the building mechanics were rough to say the least I was definitely surprised by the level of polish the game had in general which was up to a very high standard, it was quite impressive! I think it was just the small details which were a knack to many people. It may have been perfectly usable on your end but unfortunately many people play differently than others to put it lightly. I think its not very helpful to just say 'the controls were bad/janky' though so I will go through every single 'knack' I came across in my playthrough. (in order) Just so you know exactly what was going through the average playtesters mind when they are playing your game, which you might find super useful, hopefully!
(wall of text sorry) (edit - I shortened this down a bit)
This is my account of how I played your game as a playtester, in order:
- I expected you to just be able to scale the ladder by pressing W near it and going upwards, I would need more feedback that you have to press E to scale things beforehand. I think you should've put the rock ledges first, so there is only one thing whilst you learn controls.
- I also didnt expect the way you would climb the ladder would be to press E on each individual rung - I only came across this on accident when moving my mouse over the ladder after a minute or so
- Without knowledge of #2, the first thing I did was to try and move the ladder by dragging it around. I got confused with how the controls worked whilst doing this so, maybe stacking logs for the first puzzle would be more intuitive, or building a bridge like you do a bit later.
- LMB seemed to do absolutely nothing to the ladder. It only starts moving like 2 metres out at which point you either gave up because you just assume your hands cant reach so far or can't go any further as you are on the edge of the platform. I would experiment with turning the power up or turning down the friction of the wood when moving it to fix this.
- RMB did nothing but make the ladder clip into the wall a little more. It would work only sometimes, and most of the time it would just clip into the ground. I had no idea that lifting object was based on 4 separate variables - the position you are standing at, the point where you place the mouse cursor, which side is facing away from you and the length of the object. This is simply too many variables for me to grasp.
- when RMB did work, I struggled with the inverted controls - I know some people like them but for this scenario it was disorienting. I kept stuffing the ladder more and more into the ground and not understanding why because logically to me moving the mouse 'up' would move the end point of the ladder higher above the ground.
- Also, its quite disorienting switching between normal and inverted controls all the time.
- Finally, I realise you can climb onto the individual ladder rungs by the climb icon showing up for a single frame, and I press 'space' to jump onto the platform above. Although jumps are tiny in this game so it more or less makes you fall off the ladder instead. It was not displayed anywhere that you had to press LMB while looking at a ledge to climb up automatically - this is another thing I had to learn by noticing the icon pop up for a single frame when moving your camera over it.
- tbh 'jump' should be renamed to 'let go of ladder' and the LMB thing is done automatically in some way.
- The tips were actually really helpful and useful - I found this intuitive so good job on that.
- The second puzzle took quite a while to figure out because of said lack of controls but I did eventually get the hang of it once I got a better knowledge on how to play. So well done on that.
- I felt jumping was puny, For a game about jumping on props I would expect this to be much higher, you can't even jump onto the small logs.
- When picking up logs, you can't see yourself actually hold them at least on my screen until you place them down again so you have no clue where you are putting them.
- I think I eventually quit at the section where you have to use the logs and the big plank, because failing that once meant you had to do the previous section again and it just got kinda tedious. But honestly i couldve played for longer with a non-broken attention span
Honestly, If i would make this game myself I wouldnt have any rotation or ladders and you would just move crates and planks around like in gmod. But that wouldnt be unique, and honestly despite all this something about the way you are so feeble and the unique way of carrying stuff is something really creative. Honestly, this could make a really good rage game like getting over it with a few tweaks. You did a really good job. Thanks for reading my wall of text.