Glad you enjoyed the experience, I very well remember your submission, what a lovely take on the theme you had! Yeah I really wanted to expose enough settings so that
a) I wouldn’t lose too much time setting it all up and
b) people got enough customizability out of it to set the game up for their needs.
Inertia! Believe it or not, the initial version was a lot more “physics” based, I then ran playtesting and as a result went for a lot more arcadey feel as the more physics based one, which although more accurate, irritated the players more than it helped the game feel. It’d be worth experimenting with an inbetween solution for the future though and seeing how it fares in relation to the previous.
Esc to exit the map is a fantastic catch, that is easily fixed and makes total UX sense.
I was working on that! On stream! Haha, but then I experienced a good ol’ brain fart and the inversion logic mad no sense to me, so I decided to take the easy way out and put an info note there. However for a more polished post-jam version this is a must to have in there, ideally ranging from 0 - 2, where 0 is none, 1 is default and 2 is double of the default. Should be easy enough.
In terms of checkpoints, that was a design decision. I wanted to give the player the agency as in some levels there are multiple options for checkpoints and the one you want to activate is the one that’ll most help you current strategy. Otherwise part of the gameplay would turn out having to find a way around the checkpoint which you don’t want to remain active as after having died you wish to return to the currently active one.
Thank you for the long and detailed post and again, for playing the game!