really interesting to get a peek at all the ideas that didn't make it into the final version, it really hit me while reading this how much a mid-development game is still like a hydra of potential that's getting its heads pared back. i have a weird tendency to think of game designers in the abstract as mostly filling out a defined space with stuff, even though in my own experience defining the space is no less than half the job. i guess i never managed to fully apply what i know about my own experience to other people. the questions of course are all very familiar, worrying about what reads and what moves you too far from the original vision. every day im new again i suppose
i would say i parsed this more as a game about navigating the dark than about using sound specifically to do so, i think in my own experience, the visual representations of sounds were more central than the sounds themselves, and tools representing vision more central than ones representing sound. i would say my main skill were memorization, augmented by the echo visuals and "feeling the walls", which is implemented visually/sonically but experienced more like touch. that feels right to me, it lines up well with my own sense of what navigating in the dark in real life feels like, and i agree that without the unlimited free peeking at bells/start of level, the game would have been much longer and more arduous than would have felt appropriate for the jam, so i think the calls you made here were 100% right. but i guess i'm confirming your last worry (is that rude of me?) about moving away from the original vision of using sound to navigate in the dark. i think you did! but it was toward a more holistic or multisensory experience of navigating the dark and i think that's a lot richer and more natural than limiting it to sound alone. so it was a worthwhile departure in my opinion
lastly real quick ill say once again how much i enjoyed the lightness of the tutorialization and the faith you placed in the player. felt great feeling lost at first and putting the pieces together for myself