Good job on the game, I struggled with the last level as the difficulty spiked. It was quite easy to understand what to do which was great, however I felt the controls were a bit tricky. also it felt like the player would get stuck against corners very easily which made the last level harder with so much going on. Great music and menus nonetheless and the graphics got the job done clearly.
Nice one!
Much appreciated that you played so much and thank you for the input!
Presuming that you mean that you got stuck often in the last stages only, where NPCs are introduced, I am still not sure if this is the actual issue or not. In my mind, I want the player to try to move away from the NPCs unless they glitch, but if this creates frustrating experiences then I need to re-examine it. Maybe the true issue is that NPCs clogg the way after you unglitch them?
The last level is a funny story. Basically, I had no idea how to d design something with *every mechanic* in there (I wanted everything else to lead to this) and wanted to polish more the UI before submission. So, I inputted all previous levels in ChatGPT, and asked it to design something similar with every building type while accounting for my ad-hoc design rules. I ended up refining the result after confirming that it was pass-able. (Actually, I got several designs this way, but this was by far the easiest.)
The overall spike in difficulty, I think, comes from having 5+ mechanics in one stage *and* a large stage. I have the sneaking suspicion that the game needs another 3 stages to gradually lead up to this kind of insanity. I do have a mechanism for hard-controlling difficulty via the chance of spawning the yellow glitches on each stage, but I'd prefer not to mess that and leave the very last stage as very difficult (as a kind of skill test).
Yeah I think you're right, there maybe needed a few more levels to build up to the last level; however totally understand that with time constraints its hard to do those things. Personally I felt the number of levels and length were great for a jam game.
I did in fact get stuck often on the last stage and its probably due to the volume of things that were happening, lots of NPCs the spikes etc. and narrow corridors made it harder to actually get around than I expected.
Cool idea using GPT to generate a rough level design that you refined to make use of btw :)
