Woah. That was crazy. I really enjoyed this game. I read you had sent a message to #jam-general about designing puzzles, and as a guy who loves designing puzzles and playing puzzles I thought I should try it out. This game broke my brain.
I read some people mentioning the steep learning curve and I agree. It's really steep, but I think more than it just being steep, what is happening is that some of these puzzles aren't as difficult as they are intimidating. Here's an example:
This puzzle introduces three new pieces of information to the player:
- Some buttons need to be held down instead of just pressed once.
- Boxes exist, can be pushed around, and are also effected by the chromatic aberration.
- Chromatic aberration can have more than only two different states. (That is: You don't just flip flop between two different positions per object.)
This is a lot of information to spring on the player in one level. In addition this puzzle is essentially two puzzles in one. The first half is the part I've drawn a red box around: The puzzle of moving the box up to the button (including its other half). The second half is the part I've drawn a blue box around: The puzzle of moving one half of the box down to the other button (which requires figuring out which half to keep and which half to move). Keep in mind that you need to do all of this while maneuvering the player character, which already requires some brainpower. So I was at maximum brainpower here.
When I first saw green added into the mix, I considered stopping. But then again, I realized that the level was just intimidating because of the amount of information I had to juggle in my brain. It was three separate puzzles, so I started isolating them in my brain and ignoring parts that didn't matter for each mini-puzzle. I think especially when there are more colors in the mix, having three or even four possible positions for each object becomes incredibly difficult to keep track of. Especially in the final two levels where you don't even know where one of the positions is. Those two levels where the screen would be tinted showing you only where two of the possible positions were were hellish. In the first one, I didn't even realize what was happening so when I saw the green character appear, disappear, and then appear near its target (on accident). I thought it was a bug. So when I got to the final level, I had to figure out through a lot of trial and error that there were hidden positions for each element in each color (which I should've learned in the previous level) and where those positions were. It really felt like the puzzle game equivalent of a dark souls boss.
I'm really happy I powered through and beat the game. The ending was really cute.
I hope this comment isn't overwhelming or too long. But I really liked this game and I think it could be improved significantly if the levels introduced new concepts one at a time, focused on solving one problem at a time, and maybe limited how much information you needed to keep in your head per level. You can make a full game with multiple sets of levels with what you have already. Thank you so much for making this game. I had a great time with it!