qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dream Punk]

adding a review for this while i'm here because it's downright criminal how this went completely under the radar.
figured i'd leave a few tips for people that want to play this later using what i discovered on my own so far:

the game has a lot of interesting mechanics and movement options; it's also fairly challenging.
i can think of at least two challenges that require extreme knowledge of how the "ness" ability works, and both of them reward a chime so they're pretty much mandatory for completion.
(the balloon challenge in the top left of the map, where the timing is very strict, and the entire room in the middle of the map, which is already quite difficult to find and is basically a ness skill check, since you can't traverse it in any other way).

for starters, i recommend going to the right of the starting screen where you'll be able to unlock the hookshot ability. this will help immensely with getting some tapes to upgrade yourself early on.
i made the mistake of going to the left first on my first playthrough and that made it much more difficult to make significant progress. once you get the hookshot, you can start going left where you'll be able to get glide.

between bounce and glide, it's possible to adjust yourself indefinitely while bouncing on balloons, and the hookshot will allow for quick recovery and air mobility, which would otherwise result in constantly falling in water and being stuck in the same restricted area for a while.

my one gripe with the game is how the various abilities (besides how to perform them) are mostly left unexplained, along with their upgrades. there's also some controls that aren't explicitly stated, and knowing about them makes a massive difference.

for example, you can perform ness using C instead of Ctrl. this will prevent you from accidentally closing the game window with Ctrl+W if you accidentally press them in combination while messing around with the ability.
incidentally, you can only direct the ness ability using left or right, so ctrl up is not even a proper combination, but it's still easy to accidentally input by mistake if you're controlling the character at the same time.
while you can use A and D to control the ability, you can also use the left and right arrow keys (while the playable character itself can only move with WASD)

in regards to upgrades, bounce and glide are the most useful to upgrade, since they increase how high you can bounce and your maximum air time.
investing a bit into hookshot may be useful for increased range, although i never figured out if that's what it actually does once upgraded.
movement speed is self-explanatory, but i personally never upgraded it more than once because i was worried it may mess with my control over precise platforming.

upgrading ness increases distance covered when launched, and at max level it also increases your speed (reduces time necessary to cover that distance).
however, sometimes covering more distance is detrimental (specifically for the dedicated room in the middle of the map, which is designed with a specific distance covered by the ability in mind).

in regards to the grind ability, it may be because it's unlocked way later when you've already gotten used to your other abilities, but i never found any real use for it.
it was also difficult to figure out where you can use it or not; you need to be holding shift while overlapping "wires", which are specifically the ones that usually lead to buttons. (one example is freefalling on the starting screen while holding shift. you'll automatically grab onto the wire that passes through the whole screen).

above all, fully upgrading recall is a boon. aside from allowing you to teleport back to the starting area, when maxed out it allows to freely fast-travel between any area.
you need to hold E until only the map is shown, and while holding E you can use arrow keys to change the highlighted area on the map where you want to fast travel to, then release E.

back when i played to completion, i managed to amass a total of 22 upgrade points, so there should be at least 22 tapes you can collect, for those interested in upgrading their abilities.
in any case, you can always re-spec if you talk to the npc in the starting area (you can view your current upgrades at any point by pressing TAB, but you can only re-allocate them by talking to said npc).

additionally, the last time i played there was a bug which unlocked chime medals even without collecting all of them.
i never figured out how it works specifically, but my guess is that chimes collected over multiple playthroughs count towards the "overall amount" in regards to medals.
that is to say (unless it's been patched since), it's likely possible to get the medal for "collecting all 9 chimes" by collecting the first one repeatedly over multiple new games.
it's still possible to collect all 9 chimes legitimately in a single playthrough (as i've done it before), but as mentioned the last 2 or 3 are extremely difficult to get

bokononyossarian responds:

Thank you! We are happy that some folks have enjoyed it!!!

[BETON]

is ascend timer-related? the best i can do is barely above 2 minutes so if it's sub 2 that's real rough.

i was thinking it may be related to the platform at the top, but the problem with that is the platform already starts at "ground level", and it begins rising as soon as you collect the last collectible.
even if you were already near the platform it would be difficult to make up the height difference considering the jump height, so there's no way to make it up there in time even if you leave the highest collectible for last.

additionally, the game could really use a proper reset button. something that doesn't force to refresh the page if you want to restart from scratch

EDIT: i've circled the border of the entire map way more times than necessary, and moved the camera to look through walls hoping to find something hidden.
after throwing myself off the map an innumerable amount of times, i've concluded there's absolutely no hint whatsoever in-game anywhere.
aside from the itch.io page for the game itself and soundtrack, there's also no other resource related to this game anywhere on the internet. so i got nothing

EDIT 2: ended up having to get help to "figure it out" (and by that i mean they pretty much spelled out how to) and now that i see it, i kind of hate it?

for one, it feels very gimmicky: there is absolutely no indication anywhere if you're looking for it "normally".
in fact, the only way to see it feels completely unintended, rather than part of the game.
moreover, once you do get it, it completely invalidates the entire core of the game, which is platforming.
i'm not sure how that affects timed runs, but i reckon it must be very frustrating for someone playing the game normally, then realizing the best way to approach the game is basically cheating

Fe26 responds:

I can tell you it is not timer related. And it has something to do with the platform at the top but there is something you are missing. Perhaps you could start looking "outside of the game itself".

But if is it speed what you want, there is a speedrun.com page that might help you.

[TrashKitty]

found the pole on level 4 of 6 (ignoring the tutorial), the one where timers are first introduced.

might help someone else, considering i spent an ungodly amount of time trying to climb the left edge of level 2 only to be met with a solid wall.
in hindsight i'm glad it wasn't there because of how difficult it was to get up there in the first place

[The Munchers]

a few notes for anyone playing this game:

each mode has 4 main stages: breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert
each level has 3 bonus items; if you collect all items in a stage, you'll play a bonus stage.
the bonus stages are, respectively: brunch, quick snack 1, quick snack 2, after midnight.
each bonus stage also has bonus items, but they're only relevant for your score.
this means each game has 4 stages, with potentially up to 4 additional bonus stages, for a total of 8 stages overall

you can press spacebar to attack, and have a limited number of attacks.
you can easily play a full game without ever using the attack button, but while rare it is possible to encounter a set where all 4 lanes are blocked by jawbreakers/mooncheese.
however, the attack only works on mooncheese and nothing else, so keep that in mind.

the "iron fist" and "vanishing" achievements are possible, but only on your first ever attempt:
for some reason, once you've eaten a jawbreaker or mooncheese, the game permanently saves as "having eaten one", so the only way to get the achievements if you can't do it in your first sitting is to entirely erase all your save-data before attempting it.
this is easily accessible if you're playing the game using newgrounds player, which saves your data locally on your pc.

for iron fist, either hard or expert mode probably work, but i can confirm it works on hard mode.
for vanishing, the order in which the 3 modes are played seems irrelevant (i've played hard, then easy, then expert); you also only need to clear the main 4 stages, so aside from dodging mooncheese (and additionally jawbreakers), it's also recommended to avoid bonus items if possible so you need to play as few total stages as possible.

in regards to bonus items:
every level has 3 unique bonus items. they're different between levels, but each specific level has its own fixed items;
for example, breakfast's bonus items are always apple, grape, bacon.
they will appear during the level in a random order (so having an empty space while collecting them doesn't necessarily mean one was missed yet)

however, there's a few bugs in regards to these:
- brunch's bonus items are apple, grape, bag. however, in level you'll get apple, pinapple, box. this is the only level with different bonus items than the ones listed.

- the brunch and after midnight bonus levels are unavailable in easy mode; even if you collect all bonus items, those levels will be skipped.

- on expert mode, the second bonus item (pineapple) during bonus 2 (quick snack 1) will never appear in-game. thus, the "bonus muncher" achievement (and consequently its respective medal) is impossible to obtain.

since it requires to get "every bonus item in-game", i'm not sure if it's only because of the missing item in expert mode, or also because of the two unavailable stages in easy mode. either way, it's unachievable

[Rolling Lee 2.0]

while there's certainly an element of randomness which would normally make the game "unfair", it's balanced out by infinite continues, very generous checkpoints and more than one hitpoint per stage.

if you ignore how the bosses movements basically make or break a run (and how they can clip through walls lol) the difficulty is challenging without requiring pixel perfect movement or similar gimmicks.
(basing this on hard mode, which is the only difficulty i played, under the assumptions that easier difficulties are easier)

if i had to bring up a few complaints, one would be how "close" the player character is to the bosses attacks.
while this works fine for endless mode and the dodging sections, it becomes a problem against the very first boss' attacks, which have a spread that makes it impossible to avoid damage unless you're at opposite sides of the screen, making the first boss one of the "hardest" ones to get past due to rng.

there's also some kind of glitch with the 3rd boss (stage 2 phase 2), which seems to freeze/crash the game randomly.
have yet to figure out the actual trigger, but it seems to be unrelated to time elapsed, browser used, or remaining boss hp.
i'd say i managed to get past the frozen screen only about 1 every 7 attempts, assuming it's entirely random;
my only other guess is that it happens when you "miss your attack window", as in, when there's a gap in the planets that fall mid-screen, but you can't hit the boss even once before they start falling again.
this is purely conjecture and i don't really see how that would be possible, but that's about when it felt like the game froze up, imo.

4th (and last) boss is extremely difficult. unlike the first boss you can somewhat predict its movement, and there's a few safe spots that allow to get past its first phase without much effort if you know what you're doing.
at about half hp, you're thrown into another dodging section, and then the real aggravating part begins.
when it ends, you're immediately thrown back into the action. sometimes, you'll be overlapping the boss attack and die immediately, which is mildly upsetting.
the second phase is almost identical to the first one, except for the addition of an extra set of bullets that spawn diagonally from the bottom of the screen.
while these don't overlap with the "safe spots" from phase one, they make it nigh impossible to move OUT of the safe spots and get an attack in without dying.
there's still some random aspects to the boss' attacks timing, so it took a significant amount of attempts to clear even though i had an idea of how to hit the boss without immediately dying, somewhat.

tl;dr challenging game, fairly decent execution, somewhat reliant on rng which is detrimental for skill-based games such as bullet hells.
can't really say how difficult it is overall, because it's more lenient than expected for its genre when it comes to dying, but this is also necessary due to its randomized nature.
i suppose it balances out

hopefully the third boss crash is just an isolated issue on my side, otherwise it should probably be addressed at some point

[Disguise and Conquer]

nothing particularly elaborate, but i had fun mixing and matching.
the end screen dialogue is pretty funny.

been trying to figure out the values and i gotta say some of the items i thought were "obvious" for each disguise ended up actually giving less points than others.
either they were really well thought out specifically to make it difficult to get S rank, or the exact opposite of that lol.

also for some reason i can't see the buttons for story mode and free play on the main menu; it's just 2 black boxes.
it's at worst a visual glitch so it doesn't really affect gameplay, but i wanted to mention it in case it's only a problem on my side

currently making a guide but there's a lot of trial and error involved so it may take a while

EDIT: fixed
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/1614bc47bb5aa5fa6703ab78254cd824

AhWham responds:

Thanks for the review! On the topic of the scores and getting S rank, they were specifically thought out but I should've done more to help players understand that better. I tested a bit with the main menu and I haven't encountered the black boxes glitch you mention, could be a issue with the file path to the texture sprites.

Also, if you need help with the guide: I can provide the specific numbers for each costume if you'd like!

[Madness: The Battering]

making an updated review because 1.0.2 plays much different than 1.0.0

for starters, having 3 energy instead of 2 per turn makes the game much more bearable, since you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to play something at least once per turn.
it also makes the game faster overall so that's nice. the timeout timer being reduced also helps with that.

i think rebalancing the characters to be much weaker than before was a good choice.
having x2 attack on legendaries specifically was straight up broken, which was exacerbated by other uncommon characters having lower defense as a trade-off for higher attack.

the only issue with the rebalancing is that now pretty much every character has 1 defense, with a few outliers having slightly better defense. this pretty much defeats the purpose of defense cards, which although not completely useless don't add much to the table in terms of survivability i reckon.
still, it's probably not a good idea to address characters stats for a while, if not at all at this current stage, because that would open a whole bunch of other problems with the balancing imo.

cards overall feel ok due to the increase to the energy base.
cards that were previously a waste of energy don't feel completely useless anymore, since you're likely to be able to still use something afterwards and it's still 1 damage versus none at all.
cards that previously felt overly expensive like the hook (3 cost, 8 damage), now feel ok to use since you don't need to skip an entire turn just to be able to play them, and dealing 8 in a turn is still respectable damage.
grav apple is still broken, especially in comparison to the aforementioned hook; 1 cost for 10 damage is insane. though i'm guessing the reason it doesn't feel as polarizing as before is likely due to the change in the number of cards within the deck mentioned in the patch notes.
although i have no idea how many of those were there before, i can definitely tell it changed for the better.

i have one gripe with the gacha because i've been constantly rolling the 500 one and somehow still got most of the commons even though they're supposedly 1%. not really an issue with that per-se, but since i'm trying for all the characters and still missing a fair number of legendaries, i figured my luck is surprisingly good, in the worst way possible lol.
i think i'm missing about 10 characters overall but i keep rolling dupes orz.
ok rant over

so yeah, probably not a good idea to change the balancing for a while as long as it's still somewhat fair.
i reckon if both cards effects and character stats were to be addressed properly, it would take a lot of time and testing, meaning it's not something that can be patched in a matter of a few days

the minigames are fun, and also award extra money which helps in the long run.
you have no idea how many hot dogs i've eaten lol.
turns out the head hunting minigame is the best way to farm money; if you know what you're doing, you can easily make a thousand coins in a matter of minutes.

if there's one change that can probably be done in a reasonable amount of time, it would be improving the tutorial.
i've been matched with a few people already who either keep using multiple defense cards on the same character, hoping to increase their defense further, or straight up on a character with already good defense, to no effect

i understand it's part of the theme, but red text on dark background is also quite difficult to see.

edit: minor report
there's a mismatch for some of the unlocked medals. unfortunately i don't recall exactly which one is which, but i think at least the requirements for mermad had been swapped with another character.
the medkit card (3 cost, 10 group heal) displays 15 heal to all. the current effect is already strong enough imo so if it gets corrected it should probably be the picture and not the effect.

[Hell Runner Part 4]

1. HOTEL ROOM 666 - pick up the camera. get invitation
2. FLESH PITS - dialogue. get matchbox
3. DEMON HUNTER - use matchbox. get photo
4. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
5. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get card
6. MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. get donut
7. HOTEL ROOM 666 - dialogue. get Jikininki
8. DEMON HUNTER - dialogue. get blood coin
9. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - use blood coin. dialogue to get key
10. LABORATORY - use key. get energy rune
11. TIME PORTAL - use rune. get smoking pipe
12. STRAWBERRY FIELDS - dialogue. get strawberry
13. FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue. get harp
14. WEED SHOP - dialogue. get card
15. MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. get frozen treat
16. HEAVEN'S GATE - dialogue. get song
17. FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue. get Enko
(Purple Haze) STRAWBERRY FIELDS - dialogue
18. DEMON HUNTER - dialogue. get blood coin
19. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - use blood coin
20. WEED SHOP - dialogue. get photo
21. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
22. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get horus coin
23. TIME PORTAL - enter portal, then dialogue. get stone of anubis
(Archangels) FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue
24. LABORATORY - dialogue. get beer
25. FLESH PITS - dialogue. get George
(Cruel Fortune) HOTEL ROOM 666 - interact with the crystal ball
26. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - dialogue. get photo
(Spank Bank) LABORATORY - dialogue
27. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
(Bravo) MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. win the quiz
28. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get control chip
(Skin Face) DEMON HUNTER - dialogue
(Hell's King of Metal) HOTEL ROOM 666 - dialogue
29. TIME PORTAL - dialogue. get Excalibur
(Eternal Damnation) chose to spare god

i'm biased because i played all the other ones, though if i were to pick one thing that's mildly annoying, it's the one minigame where you just need to click the same spot until the bar fills up, which you need to do like 4 different times with no change whatsoever

[A Light Maze: Beezlebulbs Gambit]

the game is ok but it desperately needs a better explanation for all of its mechanics.
i'm making a review for this specifically to add what i managed to find while playing, for future reference.

game starts with a (seemingly) unskippable cutscene and a whole pseudo-minigame that is wholly unnecessary imo. you need to interact with the e-mail you get and confirm to get started with the actual game.

you're the small lightbulb, and you move with arrow keys or wasd. it takes a while for the character to start moving, like there's some sort of friction on start-up.
spacebar is used to toggle the light on/off, which is the main mechanic of the game.
you have 2 separate bars to keep track of: you energy bar, which depletes overtime while the light is on, and your actual hp.
there are lightbulb boxes scattered around the map: these are checkpoints; when you die, you respawn to the last checkpoint you touched.
if you die due to your hp depleting, you should respawn with 3 hearts.
if you die due to your energy depleting, you respawn to the last checkpoint with the same amount of hearts you had.

the main objective of the game (i think) is to roam the map and collect lightbulbs.
while the light is on, your energy is constantly depleting so you need to turn off the light otherwise you'll "die".
while the light is off, you can walk freely but you won't be able to see any walls. it's also difficult to see in general so you'll want to walk around with the light on most of the time anyway.
while the light is off, you can press X to drop a "night light". these are supposed to be markers but they don't do much besides telling you that there "isn't a wall where you dropped one". they don't really illuminate your path in the dark in any way, and dropping one also consumes energy, so you're better off just walking with the light on. basically, they're mostly useless.

you can recharge your energy while standing on a battery. batteries can be found around the map, and are likely limited in number.
while the light is on, you can press B while standing on a battery to collect said battery; collecting a battery costs one heart. if you have only 1 heart left, you cannot collect a battery. you can hold up to 3 batteries at once.
while the light is off, you can drop a battery on the ground. this costs nothing, and you can drop a battery anywhere as long as you hold one. this means you can walk around with the light on while holding batteries, drop one when you need to recharge your energy, then trade one heart to pick back up the battery until you reach the next checkpoint.
while highly annoying, it's still the preferred way to move around the map rather than doing it blind imo, which invalidates the whole on/off mechanic;
not because you can do it, but because having the light off is so annoying and not worth it, it's still better to juggle your energy and hp with the lights on than to deal with that.

now to the main issue, and the whole reason i made this. to get out of the first room at all, you need to open doors. to open a door you need a key. to get the key, you need to bring it 3 "eyes".
the "eyes" are those red ball enemies that you can find around the map.
they will follow your position while the light is on, and will not follow you with the light off.
if they touch you, they will also drain your energy, which makes the whole endeavor extra annoying.
you need to lure 3 eyes to the key so that the key will follow you, then lure the key to a door to open it. the key will follow you regardless of the light being on/off.
the eyes also seem to not be able to cross batteries in their path, so if you dropped a battery and are unable to pick it back up, you'll need to do a whole lot of backtracking until you get an extra heart to pick it back up so you can continue luring them.
this whole system is not explained anywhere and honestly is one of the main problems of the game.

another problem comes with the level design: once you're past the first door you're met with spike traps and spider? enemies. if you touch them, you lose hp. i can't tell if the spider enemies also drain your energy, but they will follow you regardless of the light being on/off. fortunately i've found you can kill them by dropping a battery on your position while they're onto you, otherwise they'd be extremely irritating to deal with.

the spike traps however are terrible: once you walk over a spike trap, it triggers and hits you for one heart. unless you're walking straight over it laterally without stopping, you will be hit. if the trap is much bigger than your character, you will be hit regardless. once a trap is triggered, it will not reset even on death, meaning it becomes an impassable wall which deals damage to you if you come in contact with it again.
this is problematic for a number of reasons, due to some checkpoints being surrounded by these traps, meaning you'll be hit almost immediately when respawning, and also locking out some paths once triggered even accidentally. spike traps won't trigger if you're walking over them with the light off, but you also won't be able to see them until you turn the light back on.
once the light is on, spike traps which have been stepped over even in the dark will trigger regardless, and become an impassable damaging wall.

i've only managed to explore the right side of the map so far, but i can say that the rooms layout is kind of all over the place. specifically, the first room on the right has a whole lot of very narrow corridors surrounded by spikes, which also happen to be unnecessarily long.
the room right after, which is the middle room that can be accessed from different doors, is entirely too big and difficult to navigate (i got completely lost).
also because i used the key to enter said room from the top right, it seems i soft-locked myself as i wasn't able to locate any other key to access another room, forcing me to refresh and lose my progress.
between the keys issue, and spikes locking path, there's no soft-lock safety measure.

the lightbulbs you need to collect are fairly noticeable. they have the same designs on the medals, and likely accompanied by some npc characters or at least something that has not been seen before anywhere else. you need to interact with either the npc or the lightbulb itself with X, which if done successfully will get you the corresponding medal, and the lightbulb will start following you.
it seems you need to trade a certain number of hearts of held batteries to get a lightbulb, so it's possible interacting with not enough resources will not work. the specific currency necessary is written on the ground next to the lightbulb.

there are coins scattered across the map, but so far i'm unsure about their purpose.

explosive barrels deal 2 hp on contact. eyes can also trigger explosive barrels, upon which explosion they'll die. it seems eyes can still walk over triggered spike traps with no issue.
there are eyes spawners in the left and middle room that look like space wormholes or something, and are triggered upon standing over them. one problem with these is that they'll spawn infinite eyes as long as activated, and i somehow managed to almost cut myself off from going through the top left corridor due to the room being completely filled with eyes which constantly drain my energy even with the light off.

this is only a first playthrough so i may edit this information as i find stuff, but so far this is all i got

EDIT: soft-locking due to a lack of keys is unlikely, as there are extra keys to access the whole map regardless of which door you open first (not actually confirmed 100%).
they're simply difficult to find because of the map layout, and borderline impossible to get because of all the exploding barrels and rocks killing the eyes and respawning in the worst possible location.
if you happen to go left first, the "flip the switch" prompt boots you into the final boss room with no way back.
it's a point of no return, which would explain why it was previously difficult to achieve getting every lightbulb in a single playthrough.

what's actually possible is soft, locking the bottom right side of the middle room. there's a whole "spike trap maze", except it's not a maze and it's just spike traps.
i can't figure out why sometimes they don't trigger even if i walk over them, but the point is it is possible to trigger all of the spikes at the entrance of the floor. there's also rock enemies which block your path and shoot at you (which seem invincible) meaning dying there is actually extreemyl likely. once you have triggered enough spikes, you are effectively softlocked out of a key and a few other rooms.

honestly the one change this game desperately needs is a revision of how spike traps work. either reset them to the inactive state on death, or at least don't make them a wall. i'm not sure how many invincibility frames there are on hit, but if it's long enough it may still be possible to get past the wall with at least a bunch of hearts, otherwise it's really impossible to deal with.

can confirm all medals work, at least on multiple playthroughs, though some of them sometimes aren't awarded but that's not due to the game.

SuperSomethingGame responds:

Congrats on collecting all the medals and thank you for seeing it thru + reviewing :D

I understand where a lot of that is coming from and appreciate the feedback. So much of what you identified are byproducts of the game having more systems, scale and scope then time to make those things works as well as they could have lol.

Consequently, this will be improved upon this in future projects!

If this was a project that was in active development I would be really eager to implement some of this feedback, but this was intended as a one and done for a Game Jam + Learning.
This project was built in less then a week as my first project for the game engine GDevelop.

Not so long ago, I was considering switching engines for future projects and came across GDevelop and noticed the company was in the middle of its own fairly big game jam, so I decided to use that as a reason to speed run learning and trying out the engine + a new project management system that was also entirely new to me (Miro, having used Trello and all the sticky notes+notebooks in the world before)

I had 6 days at that time to work on the project and have it summitted, I also worked my normal job during that time, I missed a fair bit of sleep trying to wrangle this one in haha.

I vastly overestimated how much crunch that really was lol.

This new engine is parallel in a lot of ways to the engine I use but wound up a lot different then I expected, and this kind of got in the way of a few things I would have normally included like save states which was a planned feature but was cut due to time. I ended spending a lot of time scoping out the project, (over?)planning and building out the features and systems I had and got bogged down in the systems building.

Finishing the systems I scoped out took me easily 25-40% longer then I expected due to some unaccounted knowledge gaps in this new software, and I wound up short on time to balance the core loop and map, I spent literally half a day being able to test the full game loop after completing the whole map. 97% of the testing done was for feature testing along the way + implementations, that left very little time for polish, which I regret because my usual design philosophy would have been more iterative and focused on the moment to moment stuff that would make it way less annoying to play while maintaining a challenge.

I finished with all my key goals checked though which included having a
* Build from a fresh project + ground up to better learn the software
• A complete story, coherent theme/style/setting with a lesson, even if simple & silly
• Can be completed with low chance of game breaking issues.• (ie, minimum viable product)
* Gamepad, Touch, and Keyboard + Mouse Control
* Complete Pause Menu, with newgrounds login + at least music, full screen toggle, and link to my work.
* One continuous play session ( no hard pauses in gameplay after the pre game introduction)
* Newgrounds API = leaderboards + achievements (first time trying this too) (this missed the deadline but I added it along with some other "zero day" fixes, making for a total of 7 days, even though 98% was done in 6)

+ Ultimately learn GDevelops/ Miros core systems in a sprint, so I can decide if it was worth using in the future for other prototypes, jams, full projects etc.

I unintentionally put features/ game feel mechanics ahead of the UX for a lot of the project while I was focusing on testing a range of things inside of GDevelop and this cost the gameplay + onboarding a fair bit.

I have a lot better sense of how to scope out future projects thanks to this experience haha.

Despite its flaws, I hope you found some real enjoyment or meaning

Again, I am truly grateful for you sharing your time with my weird internet art project and you taking the time to write up your detailed review post :D

+PS I got rid of the cost on dropping the "night" lights, because that just took deleting one line of code and might help future players more ^_^ ( or cause some unintended knock on effect >.>).

I had to at least address one of these issues otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep lol,
Then I started on a save system, got about 20minutes in and then remembered that this is closed project for me and reluctantly put it back down.