Post jam update 4: Time mode. And jam results talk.

Jaam ended and I got 11th place (a hair behind the 10th place). What a race!

Also, it was only a single day before the ratings ended that I noticed that time mode in the post jam versions was broken because of a streamer. What a good thing that I playtest my games so much! I thought it might've been due to the undo mechanic I added but no it's just that something that I did in one of the updates almost broke the entire game and I didn't notice it affected time mode as well. It would've been easy to notice if I had opened time mode just once but apparently I didn't even do that.

Anyway here are the patchy notes:

• Fixed Marisa's pop up text when hovering over a scale to actually round up the value that she will steal properly.
• Time mode works now. In the update 3 version it was just broken and didn't work at all. Also, note that you can't Undo in it sorry but I'm too lazy to implement it here.
• Added a high score tracker for the time mode. (See picture attached above) I could've added an online leaderboard too maybe but it's way too late for that now. I don't think more than 10 people might even download this update lol.
• Freezing sound effect cannot play more than 4 times at once. The new sound is much better than the old one but it can still get loud if freezing a bunch of characters. So now it's limited. (It was actually already limited to 10 times but 4 should be much better).
• All characters in level 8 reduced from 3 to 2 each. Should make the level a little less confusing.

This will probably be the last update for this game.

Post jam talkies. Lots of rambling ahead.

When uploading the game I was pretty confident that this was my most polished game yet, but it seems it was a lot of other people's most polished games as well because dear God the other games in this jam were good.

I got 11th overall, with 0.001 point behind the 10th game karmic scale lmao. I wish I got top 10 in here but almost all the top 10 games here got 5 stars from myself so it was a tough battle.
My better scores were in theming, concept, and balance. Getting 2nd place in theming is a real surprise, behind only Scales of Gensokyo, whose concept is so good that I don't think any game idea could possibly use the theme better. I also got 6th in concept, which is a shame that, similarly to overall, is right before 5th place. But looking at what those top 5 games are, yeah I have no idea how I even got close to those. I'm guessing that the crossover mechanic with megapig's game helped with that a bit. It was really good to collab with him to add this sort of thing though.

My biggest worry in score was Balance. I wanted to focus on this category when making the game because I was inspired by the last jam's balance winner, Yukarilotl, which was also a puzzle game. Since the puzzle design is tied directly to it. The reception to the puzzles was pretty mixed. Lots of people had trouble with them or found them too brute-forcy, while others had no trouble figuring out the solutions and breezed through the levels. So I'm really glad that it got 8th place. Of course, my puzzles aren't perfect. It's my first puzzle game afterall, and with such a concept you need to be really careful about how you design them. But despite that, I was pretty satisfied with most of the levels. And the ratings seem to agree.

The one level that I felt was really wasted was level 8 (The Remilia level). It's got only 2 solutions and the intended one doesn't even use any of the character's effects (other than Reimu i guess). I could've probably made it better if I increased how fast remilia's weight scaled so that the level didn't feel so rigid.

I don't know if I'll come back to this game after this. It does feel pretty finished, and only really maybe misses some more puzzle to use character synergies in more ways. But 20 levels for a jam game is already pretty good, with most players clocking at around 2 hours to finish the entire game. And despite how many people enjoyed the game, I'm not sure how many would actually come back to it if, say, 20 more levels or something was added, unless they were real puzzle sickos. And in any case working to flesh out this game might mean repurposing the entire thing to make character weights easier to deal with, which means redoing all the early levels, and I'm not big brained enough to do all of that. But idk. If you, dear reader, are reading this, would be interested in a more full game, try telling me if so.

As I said above, I wish I added an online leaderboard to time mode. Seeing many of the other jam games have such a thing made me realize how good of a thing that is to encourage playing the games (i myself got absorbed into the cirno frog game and lilywhite racing due to it) and it would've been a good way to track how high players could get scores in this mode. But it's wayyy too late now and would probably only have like 5 names on it.

I might come back to add like a mobile and web ports of the game (may Allah curse webgl for all the ui issues it causes) though.

Congrats to all the people who won the jam. And I want to thank all the people who helped me on the game, either directly or by giving suggestions. Reale, Megapig, Saishoo, Patchy, Angry cow, the many other people in the touhou gamedev server, the people who commented on the game, and really anyone who played the game. But my most special thanks comes to Molly, the amazing artist who did the majority of the art for the game and having to juggle with her work. She did great despite also working on some other teams o7. My last thanks goes to my Mike fumo.