Thank you for taking the time to review my game (and also having tried to spend some good words on it). To answer most of the points in your video:
- I had a lot of trouble even only submitting the game. I've worked on it a whooping 3 hours after ditching the previous game prototype after realizing I wouldn't have had enough time to complete the level design for the other one. After submitting the game, this is the first time I managed to access my PC. Mind, though, that this is not meant to be a justification, but it's more of an explanation with attached apologizing.
- I've explained in a devlog why the game has no description whatsoever, but it's nothing relevant, actually.
- The game is absolutely lacking any kind of unnecessary (gameplay-wisely) effect. I was planning on a bouncing sound and some screen shake, other than a bare obvious BGM. Sadly, I had no time to implement any of those, but I agree they are important for the game.
- In the aforementioned devlog, I also talked a bit about controls, but I did a small mistake: I should have hidden the mouse from the player. Actually, the way the player is meant to reset is by using the up or down arrow (and some other buttons which I don't really remember, but they should be left ctrl and spacebar). The idea of exploration should have also hit the player which had to find the controls. The main concept was having the player think "ok, the star is above me, I want to get to it, so I should want to jump, let's try it" and hit the reset button. Not hiding the mouse has been a huge oversight.
- Physics: the game uses Unity physics. However, instead of most games, I don't simply push the ball left or right, but I actually add torque unto it. This makes for good on-ground controls and no air control (which was my first idea). However, I later added a small amount of directional push in order to add some air control that allowed for small adjustments (the last star is impossible to get without said air control, which also is the first star you get). Torque and push values (other than friction, which is much more relevant than one would initially think) were adjusted during the level design phase, but this limited me in the amount of modifications I could make. Hence, when I realized that you could climb incredibly steep edges (I think you didn't try that, but you can climb basically anything as long as you can approach it the right way), I decided to make that into gameplay instead of removing it. However, I couldn't do the same with trying to add more reactivity.
- The problem with having a hard time seeing whether you are moving or not hit me 10 minutes before submitting the game. I wanted to stick with solid colors even where I could have avoided it by using the background loophole in the rules (which I had already abused in order to make complex platforms). I didn't know how to fix that quickly, so I left it as is. In these days I thought I could have zoomed the camera out proportionally to the player's speed. Misplay on my part.
- Ironically, the selling point of the game was at first (in my mind) controlling a ball among platforms at high speeds (which worked once in your video). However, the relatively poor level design and the camera problem never quite gave that feeling except when the game was going exceptionally fast (the half-loop you hit at 10 minutes in the video).
- I think I might have added an indicator of the general direction of the nearest not picked star in order to make the player not completely lost: since moving in this game is not as linear as following the arrow due to having to move according to the platforms, this would still have required you to find a way to the star of which you knew the general direction of.
As soon as I have time, I'll try to fix as many issues I can see and update the game (post-jam). If I do, would you mind trying it out again? I'd love to hear some feedback from someone who tried the first version of the game.