Thanks so much for your kind words! There are elements here that I think I would like to continue, I like the beginnings of a bunch of the wider thoughts being explored. I wrote a bit about them in my post mortem posts, after visiting the Garrison monument and thinking.
For your notes (which thank you so much for taking the time!)
I went back and forth on 10 minutes, particularly as it was the first amount of time I chose, and got various amounts of feedback on it. It's how the very broken going back to Don via Clarence came about, so you didn't need to wait it out if you chose to skip. The countdown is artificial either way, and multiple folks who played it spent the whole 10 minutes so I chose to leave it that way. It's meant mostly to put pressure on the idea that you have to fix this as quickly as possible. But healing doesn't work that way, it takes as much time as it will and no outside and arbitrary pressure can change that.
Poor Taddle, my broken child LOLOLOL. I think if I do something like this again (beyond carrying the knowledge forward) I would set up seperate bools for each loop; my folly was my lack of planning on how many there would be and trying to sneak in tiny conversations here and there at the end to pull it tighter together. I learned about half way through about Yarn Commands, which is how the animations are called (and is the most common cause of that issue). The final ending sequence was broken up until the last half hour due to my badly managed code! Makes me sad 'cause Taddle's story is all about being forgotten and unheard, so I feel I did them a disservice in not taking as much care as I should've debugging them.
I am very much on the fence about interfacing more information. Part of the issue is balancing games literacy; when I've handed the project to folks who don't play games and they ask what WASD means, it's always a challenge to think about how much info to provide. Would knowing the secret value for the breaking of the cycle help them? Or would it be more confusing? I fully admit it was put together in a 'good enough' sense, so I'd be delighted to know if you had anymore specific thoughts on what you would've found helpful or guiding while playing!
If you're comfortable, I'd love to hear about what you felt the game was telling you! I've mulled over it's meaning to me over the past week, or what I was even trying to say, and come to more conclusions that I think I thought of going in. It's something I love so much about making a project like this, so if you're up for sharing, I'd love to listen.