itch.io

Any of the non-trivial puzzles were quite hard for me. Especially as any minor mistakes would usually lead to restarting the level. The puzzles are small enough that I don't mind losing the progress. I think my issue was more about the brain-load I had to carry due to the game not keeping me informed about who I was controlling and what their assigned roles were, while keeping the solution in mind too...

I've built games a bit like this in the past. One you may have heard of is Home Sheep Home, which became super popular. You'd be in control of three of Aardman's famous sheep characters, all with different sizes and characteristics/abilities. They were fixed though, and the puzzles were one screen with no scrolling. They could all do roughly the same things so the controls were common between them all. I set three ways to select which sheep you controlled at any time - you could press 1, 2, 3 to switch directly to individual characteristics, or you could press another key to cycle through them, or you could click on them with the mouse. There was a small arrow over the one that was selected, and they'd make a bhaaa noise and play a little "I'm alert" animation when they became active. All that stuff was aimed at reducing brain load, to free up players' mental resources to solve puzzles. It must have worked, because the stats I saw last said half a billion people had played it!

You make a really good point about knowing your game well because you were the one creating it. This is why playtesting with other people is so important (and really hard to do in a 48 hour jam). Watching other people play your game is a unique and often humbling experience! You find yourself thinking "why can't they see that obvious thing that you put in there to help them pass this specific point in the level?" etc. The answer is that things that are obvious to you the designer, aren't obvious to others who aren't as close to the project as you. When you release a game, you are the best player in the world at that game! You know intimately what everything is for, all the nuances of the levels, all the clever little touches you added etc. New players take time to build up that knowledge, and it's a steep hill to keep people interested in playing long enough to get there.