Hey etaranta!
Thank you so much for trying Wheevil! Your notes were the very first feedback outside of my friends circle (and frustrated wife), and filled my morning with excitement :D Especially when you said it hooked you enough to keep playing: despite some ruthless challenges, I want to keep Wheevil's main route approachable-ish to more casual players.
I will address the pacing, the map, and difficulty spikes like in the level with Timing is Key in later builds. The current one is a compressed world I made for playtesting. In the end I plan to have interconnected world akin to VVVVVV or The End is Nigh, and the map will help a lot to hunt the flowers and secrets, and maybe will support a fast travel mechanic.
Spacebar is natural, but specifically in precision platforming I prefer to have zxc as controls: that way they allow very precise combinations, while space is a bit janky when you press it at the edge. Also, zxc is reminiscent of the arcade machines keys layouts :)
Same goes for drag, missing double-tap for dash, and dash without a direction input: they feel like a friction if you are familiar with traditional platforming, but unlock a lot of speedrunning and hardcore challenges. I am trying to hit that sweet spot where the novice player would suffer a bi more compared to traditional platformers, but get enough experience with the controls to start evaluating more complex flowers.
"I’m pretty sure I’m pressing ‘c’ within the swing radius, and often it doesn’t do anything" — I made it so you roughly must face the hook point to be able to grapple to it. And I am not sure that was the right decision, honestly, and the more I see players being confused by it, the more I think I should rethink it.
"time checks or multi-key input" is a great idea. I may think of adding more relaxed controls as a difficulty setting.
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If it won't be a burden to you, may I ask you to send me your run data?
The game records all your movement, so I can replay it and analyze where you were stuck, where my in-game instructions were not clear, and what tweaks I may need to do. It does not gather any info on you or your machine (or keypresses outside the game) — and it is a gzipped json you can look into to confirm that I really log only your in-game stuff :) You can send those to me via email, or upload somewhere. In the very bottom of the main menu there is an "Export run data" item, which will export your run