Thank you so much for your feedback! I'm really glad you enjoyed my game so much. I spent a lot of time tuning the simulation to get it to behave the way that it does and I'm so pleased that you enjoyed interacting with it!
When I first put together the controls and tested them they were difficult for me to handle and I had every intention of fixing them, but after a couple of tries I too found it very natural. I still intend to clean them up and allow for some customization to help players get over that initial hump of the difficulty curve (well, cliff in this case).
I wanted the coolant to give the player indirect control over the reaction, but I hadn't considered making other neutrons interact with it. Currently, neutrons that are not under the player's control move at a constant speed, while the player's neutron increases in velocity (until they go through cool water). There's no reason that I couldn't treat other neutrons the same way, it would also probably add to the chaos of the simulation if neutrons were speeding up!
Viewing post in Chain Reaction jam comments
Oh I didn't actually realise that the neutron slows down when it goes through the cloud, I was mainly focusing on the effect on the reactor temperature (since this was what ended my game in most instances). Perhaps I misunderstood how the temperature works, is it tied to the velocity of the active neutron?