This is pretty crazy polished for a jam game, but I do have some notes
For one thing, I'm disappointed in how major of a game mechanic those "step on every tile in this room exactly once" puzzles are (like the kinds of puzzles that the water/bubble area is filled with). I see puzzles like those as the kind of puzzle that you throw into an action game as a change of pace (like the kind of puzzle that fits perfectly in a 3D Mario game), but I find it really lacking as a core puzzle mechanic. When the game throws a massive puzzle like that in my face, it doesn't give me the same excitement as other puzzle games. My instinct is to just guess over and over until eventually I either make it through or I get bored and give up. It's definitely too late to replace all those puzzles now (which, apologies for not saying this in the prototype sprint!), but I figure it's good feedback anyway.
Additionally, a lot of the puzzles revolve around timing, or inputting precise movement. These I would cut entirely. The character doesn't feel good to try and move around precisely. There's a significant delay between when you input a move and when the character actually moves (not to mention that if you hold two directions at once, the character won't move at all). There's a huge section in the fan area, where you have to escort this little puffball through a million obstacles, and if you mess up once it disappears and you have to restart from the beginning, and it's infuriating. If I'm here to play a puzzle game, I don't want to have to make precisely timed moves, and if I'm here to play an action game, I don't want to have to do any of the other puzzles.
There's another more insidious reason for why I'd wanna cut all of those "action puzzles" -- once even a single puzzle requires tight movement or timing, then suddenly (in the mind of the player) every puzzle might contain tight movement (even if it actually doesn't). For example, I played the fan section first, which starts with a timed button -- you stand on the button, the spikes go down, and you have a limited amount of time to get through the door. That meant that later on, when I was playing the bubble section, I would repeatedly try and pick up a bubble and then run through a gate before it closed, even though (as I later learned) that doesn't actually work
I also ran into a few bugs:
- When holding diagonally (like up and left or down and right), while holding a box, you can then place that box off the grid, which I assume isn't intentional
- Not all of the terrain has collision. For example, in the lower section of the bubble level, none of the crates have collision when you walk into them
- As mentioned before, when holding diagonally, the player won't move. Ideally, I'd want this replaced with a system that lets you buffer an input (for example, if the player is holding upwards, but then taps to the right, I want them to finish their current move, make a move to the right, and then resume moving upwards). I had to implement this for my game in this jam, so if you'd be interested and you think it'd help, I'd be happy to share some of my code!
- After resetting a level, it seems like button states don't reset -- for example, go into the tutorial, put the box on the button, then hold K to reset. If you go back up, you can see that even though the box is no longer on the button, the door is open (and even weirder, if you do put the box on the button, the door closes in front of your eyes!)
It's worth noting that, even with all my critiques, I played through almost the entire game! I've spent about an hour writing this all up, and I want it to be clear that I'm doing this because I think you have a shot here for this game to be great, and I want to do what I can to help make this game better! In particular, the absolute standout of this game for me is the art. The character of Michi and the world they explore is just so charming and cute (heck, even the little arrow keys in the movement tutorial look like a pawprint!), and though I've mentioned my issues with the puzzle design, there is still a certain level of nostalgia to all the different game mechanics (I remember seeing stuff like those sliding puzzles in Pokemon games and such). I really do look forward to seeing the new colorfur (hehe) version at the end of this week!