Wow that's a lot! I'll try and respond to each paragraph.
- We tried to clear the communication fairly soon on with the first set of puzzles, so that by the time you're onto the actual map puzzles you know for sure.
- I briefly considered the indicator idea but it would have been annoying to get to work with the pixel perfect canvas and also we didn't really have the time to budget towards it at the end.
- This definitely true, but we wanted to give some new players a chance to look around freely and, more importantly, to realize that there are borders outside the grid. The slider map could maybe use a redesign to show the waterfall, alcove, and beach areas, but we didn't think it was pressing enough at the time.
- This is true -- we do have a discoloration on the Slider of the tiles and corners with the QR code, which some of our other commenters noticed. I saw that there was some color differentiation issues though and I can definitely see the issue with just walking around. We planned on making the ruins actually more ruin-like, but didn't really have the art assets for it haha.
- The river guy showed in a lot of problems and we've basically just changed his dialogue to try and be more clear with the player of his goals.
- The river was supposed to help on the final problem a lot, and Romeo & Juliet being together. Aside from this, there are two possible configurations for the U shaped piece (while leaving the middle empty, which the game doesn't really tell you), but the having pieces click into position when done idea is really good! We hadn't thought of that and will definitely note it for the bug fix release.
- Collision was just a matter of not enough testing and we have some spots where it doesn't work written down, the knot puzzle really served as an introduction to like "hey the puzzles can be on the tiles too, not just exploring around", and the start tile was intentionally left only top/right so that you would explore the top/right areas.
Thank you for all the feedback! I will be honest and say that a good part of the design was really just luck in things coming together, but a lot of it was also the hard work from everyone on our team. Thanks again for playing!