This was really fun! The difficulty reminds me of celeste - it takes some perseverance. Also I really liked the idea of dropping down to a second platform if you miss a jump. Maybe that idea could be explored more.
powercactus
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Thank you so much for your praise! I'm very glad you liked it.
Indeed, I was using the 'forward design' strategy most famously used by jblow. I'm blown away (hah) by how quickly this strategy leads to decent puzzles.
I can actually explain what's going on in Canyon: [8/] [3] [/3] takes two turns to collapse to [8], similarly how [+] [+] [2] takes two turns to collapse to [2]. It seems division is left-associative i.e. "8/3/3" is interpreted as (8/3)/3.
But the fact that you didn't understand is totally my fault. As with the -10 thing, there are some concepts I should have introduced earlier in the game via simpler levels.
This is a wonderful concept for a puzzle game. Maybe a control scheme based on wasd or arrow keys would be nice?
Puzzle games often teach their mechanics to players by making a level that's impossible to solve if you don't understand the mechanic. But the mechanics in this game are sufficiently complicated that they are hard to guess, making this approach very challenging to design. This sort of stuff requires really good pacing which is hard to polish within a game jam where you can't do a lot of playtesting.
The game feel is very smooth - that's what impresses me the most. (Although having to try again after slipping up after a very long level was frustrating. Maybe just make the levels shorter?) My main concern is that if you made the items multi-use then the levels won't really change very much - I didn't find a situation where a level was challenging specifically because the items were single-use.