I like your game. This was giving me some technical problems during control, probably relating to the display and embed size of the game? I managed to get through it. Your game is doing the same thing that my game is doing, I think: Loading assets in the middle of gameplay, causing slowdown.
I really love your design sensibilities in terms of UI, level design, and art. The intro sequence, tunes, and UI are exquisitely polished.
For critical feedback, I feel the design is a bit at odds with itself, leaving me wanting a bit more of something else. Pushing blocks is a bit tedious, and doesn't feel quite becoming of a flicker of hope, I feel. Especially when your movement code is deeply satisfying, and the way the flicker of hope fleetingly chases after your mouse invokes a really beautiful hypnotic animation, along with the foreboding clouds in a world you can JUST barely make out. I'm not sure if I'm missing out on content adding more context, but I ended up quitting after 5 minutes or so.
I feel like the puzzles could be tweaked to feel a little bit less tedious to complete. I also feel like the game would benefit from being more generous with the sparkle item, to reinforce the lighting mechanic. If this was an action game guiding a flicker through hallways of the smoke, I think I would enjoy that. Sort of imagining Bubble Breeze Galaxy from Mario Galaxy in my head.
Either way, what you have here is something special and I really enjoyed it. Thanks for making it.
Thank you very much for the feedback! This was my first “real” game outside of a couple of small projects to learn Godot a couple of months ago, so it means a lot that you gave it a try!
The gameplay aspect and level design was definitely where I struggled the most and didn’t quite manage to get it to fit with the story I had in mind, specially in the first levels. Definitely something I will look into improving and learning more about.
About the slowdowns, in which platform did you play? I could only test the windows downloadable version, but decided to include other platforms, and a web version for those who didn’t want to download something from an unknown source (which is completely understandable), but still wanted to give it a try. I’ll look into it anyway and try to update it when the Game Jam is over!
you must be a visual driven person, the general art style is good. The slowdown is on web. On a native Godot build youd hardly feel it on any modern computer with a graphics card! Same as my game! I wouldn't worry about it as a first timer, but learning about optimization is a valuable skill. Very cool!