Thank you so much for taking the time to play it and share your feedback! Your comments are helpful and encouraging. I had a variety of disparate influences for this game, but it really was all about the theme and trying to build design outward by iterating on a core mechanic (as well as keeping it something simple and achievable). I liked the idea of exploring outward from a center point that you were tied to, and I've been wanting to try implementing a grid based system. I was kind of thinking about what if spaceman spiff's world and Into the Breach gameplay but exploration/adventure. I started from the idea of getting a resource from each tile and built around that. As I got going, @broquaint introduced me to Desktop Dungeons so I played a bunch of that and it became a big influence on the movement. My goal was to create some simple systems that created rock-paper-scissors style decision tradeoffs around whether (and where) you combine resources. At the core there should be a tradeoff between needing green to advance but needing purple and orange to survive. I was thinking about chess and the puzzle of creating sightlines to cover your pieces with the ray gun. I liked the teleport as a counter to the monster moving every space you move. For movement, I struggled with wanting it to feel snappy and have immediate feedback on every click vs. needing to show the movement from tile to tile across space so the monster could move accordingly without him randomly appearing places... I fussed around with a lot of different directions hoping to discover a good way to create puzzles out of the core mechanics and I like it but felt like I never really got there.
I will take any and all additional comments/feedback/criticism/ideas you have.
I haven't played Fjords or any Michael Brough games, but I just googled Michael Brough and I think I'm about to go down a rabbit hole of awesomeness. Thank you for the connection and recommendation!