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Thank you for the feedback! ^^

Thank you so much for the review!

Not gonna lie, I cracked a smile at your description of the tea mixing process >w< But yeah, gotta give you that - proper balancing of the difficulty levels has been one of the biggest victims of a rushed deadline. But, sadly, we can't touch it while the games are still being judged for the game jam.

Thank you!!! We're glad you enjoyed the game!

Regarding the different solutions - yeeeah, we didn't really have enough time alloted to balancing the game, and that was kind of bad, the game would be much better with multiple available solutions per order.

And about the story - I was hella anxious how it's gonna be received, we wrote the dialogue lines in a single day and some of our brain cells have probably been fried in the process, so I'm hella relieved that you liked it!

That clear expectations, clear division of labor, and fluid communication is crucial for team success.

That good GDD is the key. All the features of the game must be properly described, and all the assets required for the game must be listed out. If you don't know what to do, it's hard to do anything at all, and spending time on stuff you won't need later on is just wasteful and disheartening.

And to mind the scope and to overestimate the time it will take to make things. We had to diminish the scope, like, 20 times or so.

According to git-hours: 153 hours (me and the other programmer - 110 hours, writer - 40 hours).

Doesn't include time spent by our musician and our 2D artist, and the mishaps that happened along the way, especially for our writer. She lost a ton of dialogue data bcuz of Godot and random crashes.

So I'd say a total of 220-250 hours spent is a good estimate, if git-hours is accurate.

First gamejam for me as well :) Was honestly worried that we wouldn't deliver our game on time, due to plenty of random events happening along the way, but we pulled ourselves together, coordinated everything and with proper planning made the best of it.

Oh, right, forgot to add in under this comment chain - since version 0.0.3, chained matches deal 50% less damage by default. I decided to go that way so that there is less random swings of power.

I put out an update - balance issues should be fixed now.

Thank you for the feedback!

From the looks of it, some artifact stats seem to be more powerful than others. I'll try to bring them more in line with one another for the current version of the game.

Chained matches deal the same amount of damage as normal matches.

And so far, colors of the match don't matter, but several game mechanics involving different colors are already on the roadmap. Stay tuned.

I'll come up with a way to fix this.

RNG for level 1 seems to be overzealous when it comes to creating matches on the board. (same for level 4).

It might have to do with the shape of the board itself, the amount of types of different gems, and with the likelihood with which new gems appear on the board already aligned into a match.