Once I understood that I had to rescue someone that I can control, and that I didn't have to go all the way down, I found the game quite interesting. On the second level I failed because I didn't realize I only had so much turns left, and also I didn't know how to attack properly. I picked Gamma since I liked how simple his building the path backwards abilities are.
I think the main thing this game lacks is interactive visual feedback. Because even when I didn't skip the tutorial and read it, I still missed the part where it says 0/2 to rescue in the portal. And when I went back from the pit to see the portal says that, I thought I missed another character somewhere at the bottom. So I don't think there's any reason to make the level bigger than it should be. Also since I already found the character, maybe there could've been an indicator, like a triangle pointing at it and says that I have found him. To ensure I don't waste time elsewhere. Plus at first the enemies attacking me made me feel hopeless as I had no seemingly simple tools to deal with them. But it seemed that I can't die from the enemies alone so I just kept eating them as I go.
Also I didn't notice that the first level had any step limitation at first as I was wandering through the level. I understand why it was done, you didn't want the player to feel like the game was too hard and let him figure out the gameplay. But I think this could've been done with a smaller level, that is growing as time goes. Just like most puzzle games do. So as a result, me losing in the second level caught me by surprise, but unfortunately the game forced me to start all over again instead of restarting that specific level.
Very ambitious for a game jam in terms of scale, but I think the gameplay is pretty solid. If you had fixes those issues, which you probably are aware as well, I could see myself playing and exploring it more. Well done!
Viewing post in Falling Star Crew: Retrieval jam comments
A lot of this are my thoughts exactly! The game was ambitious (maybe too ambitious for 4 days ahahahaha) and we put our focus into making the ENTIRE game, and to make it playable from start to finish without any major bugs. We did that! But by the end of the jam we barely had time to properly test the game, let alone add a tutorial and proper feedback to everything.
During most game jams we put way more focus into polish and feedback, making the game sparkle before even *deciding* what the scope of the game will be. This jam we went for the opposite approach, spending additional time planning and designing and properly implementing content, rather than adding particle effects and animations and sound effects to make the game *feel* intuitive to play as we went--Gamma's laser attack has ZERO feedback on it, it simply deletes everything when you activate it ahahahaha! Doing the jam this way was interesting, and I learned a lot. Given 1 more day, I believe that we would have implemented most of this comfortably!
This is good feedback, thanks for playing!