> The only thing that needed a bit of work was some of the transition states, as it made the player feel a bit jumpy (for ex. changing directions)
I agree, the rotation of the player should have been smoothed out instead of instant. The controller itself had a few quirks I had to spend a lot of time fixing. I ran out of time a little and made a dirty fix for the rotation just to make sure its in there.
> Theme-wise, the theme is used in the context of the story but not so much as part of the gameplay.
The mechanic that allows you to turn yourself to ash and back to a human form was our main go-to for that. The player is essentially turned to ash and reborn (Like a phoenix would turn to ash and back to its phoenix form.) I do think we could have sold this idea a bit more and polished it to get this across better. There is a second point that we wanted to make the player mentally "reborn" in the sense that he feels refreshed and can now move on after what happens in the game.
> Notes on the player controller
I wanted to use my kinematic controller, and that took up a large bulk of the work. Not my smartest choice I have to admit. About 4 hours before the end of the jam I ended up wanting to fix it but I did not have the time to do so... (for the record, I was also getting a bit frustrated trying to get through the end with the less-than-optimal controller) I will take this feedback and improve the character controller since I am planning to reuse it for other projects.
> I felt like the dialogues could have used a larger font to make it easier to read on large resolution screens.
That is an oversight, You are right. (Going to add a text scaler for future versions of the textbox since I also plan to reuse this for my other projects. Especially the Node editor to create the dialogue and the state machine)
Thank you for playing the game and for your feedback! We greatly appreciate it :)