Very nice game! I loved the design of the player and the enemies, especially the shooting bird guys. I really liked how they hide back in their egg when they don't have line-of-sight to you, I thought that was a neat touch. The dying and respawning animations for the player are cool, but they started feeling a bit slow after a few deaths. I think cutting out the second of delay after your character has already disintegrated would help a lot.

The environments look alright but don't really match the characters in my opinion. The world looks pretty grounded for the most part while the characters look like they belong in a more steampunk setting, though I guess time limitations were a big factor here. Many rooms feel a bit large and repetitive, making it hard to tell where you're supposed to go sometimes. On a few occasions, I felt like I was in a copy-pasted version of a room I was already in before, but with different entrances and exits. On the other hand, the handful of health pieces I was able to find were a fun little extra challenge and a nice motivation to explore.

The black-and-white segments didn't really feel like they contributed much to the game, other than making those parts harder due to not being able to see your character. I'm guessing they were an attempt to incorporate the theme, but in all honesty, the game doesn't come across as very "minimal" with those monochrome sections being so few and far between. They could have been a great stylistic choice if the whole game was done like that (and if you could see your character), or perhaps if there was a mechanic like the Subspace from Super Mario Bros. 2 where you can temporarily make the world "minimal" to solve puzzles or find secrets. However, as it stands, they were kinda just a minor annoyance.

The music is nice, although the main theme seems way too cheerful for the overall style of the game. However, I do like the change of tone with the more somber versions of the theme in the later areas, the song playing on the big bridge being by far my favorite of the ones I heard. I think the contrast between the different remixes could have been an even more effective storytelling device if the early areas were also more friendly-looking to match the happier music.

As someone who has never played many 3D platformers, the controls were decent enough to get used to. Sadly, I wasn't able to take advantage of the gamepad support, since I'm one of the weirdos who likes inverted Y-axis on the right stick, and the option wasn't available here.

It does feel like it takes a while for your character to stop, especially out of a sprint. The ledge grab is definitely a great lifesaver and very appreciated, as often it was easier to jump early and aim for the ledge, rather than try to land on the platform itself and end up overshooting. The limited turning while sprinting feels kinda overly punishing, and the whole steam mechanic (while fitting for the character) seems a bit unnecessary gameplay-wise, only serving to slow down the game by making you wait or run back and forth sometimes.

In general, it kinda felt like the solution to most puzzles was to just sprint and jump, and at times it was hard to tell if I was following the intended path or sequence breaking due to how tight some of the jumps were and how far you could go at full sprint.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get past the big bridge, as the gap seemed too big to make even with a full sprint into hover, and I couldn't figure out how to interact with the floating head guys. I tried left-click, right-click, bouncing off of them, but nothing seemed to work. I'm guessing there's probably something obvious that I'm missing here, and I'm open to hints and advice because the game is a lot of fun and I'm curious to see the rest!

I LOVED that animation right at the start. awesome stuff.

I've been building 3D platformers for a *long* time so I hope you don't mind some unsolicited feedback! Honestly for the fairly short jam turnaround you built a *ton* of content and should be super proud of what you did!

• The player's acceleration curves feel pretty off - which seems to be a common point of feedback. I'd suggest playing various games in the genre you view as inspiration, taking recordings, and literally noting how many frames / milliseconds on average it takes the character to go from a stop to their max base speed, and then upon releasing the stick how long it takes that same character to go from max base speed to a stop. You'll find it tends to be snappier on both ends, though with a good bit of variety depending on the game. By designing your character locomotion in a way that exposes those acceleration and friction numbers you can experiment a ton by tuning those knobs until just moving your character around feels good, and you can proceed from there.
  • Bonus points if you tweak the target base speed up or down depending on whether the player is going uphill or downhill based on the normal of the ground they're standing on - helps make the character feel like they're actually reacting to their environment.

• You've gone for the choice of making the character's facing direction lock-in upon jumping. This is a pretty big schism in the world of 3D platformers - with plenty of great games on both sides of the fence. What I will say is that games that do what DELLA does (locking the direction on a jump) tend to offer options to correct or redirect jumps at least a bit. SM64 kick, Sunshine hover nozzle, etc. They also make sure to preserve your forward speed into the jump, and I'd swear there'd be times in DELLA where I tried to drift a bit sideways and would actually *lose* forward momentum for having done so. The player's forward-backward and side-to-side aerial speed should basically be entirely separated in this case, with tunable values for how much the player can add or subtract to their forward-backward airborne speed (0 would mean like, castlevania-level committal jumps), and separately how much side-to-side drift you give them. You should also take a look at the games which allow the player to rotate in midair - this case is actually generally easier to implement (grounded and airborne cases are handled basically the same under the hood) and plenty of great games with complex movement do it too. Lots to explore here!
• I'd want that Dash move to more instantly snap me up to a fixed "run speed" - I can appreciate the acceleration but from a dead stop it felt tough to really get into a flow. Maybe rather than a smooth acceleration simply having a base dash speed and then, if the player sustained it for X seconds, they reach a Gear 2 Dash speed? You could also do different particles / sounds / animation poses for each stage, and it could all read a bit more cleanly.
• In general if I could give any feedback I'd say most actions in the game felt like they could be *snappier*. The player claw attack felt very tame (like a light 'nyeh' rather than a real scratch), when I hit a rotating wheel it rotates super gently and the door / platform moves slowly to its destination. All of this should be faster, more exaggerated - it'll read much better and keep the player in the flow.
• You did great on the ledge grabbing. That's not a trivial thing and you totally nailed it. No notes.

But yeah!! 3D platformers are *so* hard and you have a really impressive showing for only a month - I hope you're able to take what you've done for this jam and build more cool stuff!

Very cool atmosphere! I liked the robotic / clockwork character designs, combined with the negative space environments, felt very dreamlike. The basic movement felt okay, maybe a bit slippery? I wish I had more specific feedback on that, I'm not a 3D dev lol. But the ledge mantle was a nice addition and the abilities were neat. Good job!

I loved the death and respawn animations as well as the sound effects they were very good the movement felt okay most of the time some how I felt like I was not controlling my character at times but its probably a skill issue lol good job

Lots of content! Pretty fun. The movement felt a bit weird sometimes, like I wasn't in full control. However, the height ability being based on a parry is very creative and I cheer for that. Cool game!