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yeah! no problem. :] i'm also surprised at how few narrative-heavy games i see at jams, but my mechanics and narrative tend to inform each other heavily.

with more time i'll definitely figure something out, but the concept for this game definitely could lend itself to being a little disjointed in the way each mechanic is presented. i'm trying to think of ways to tie up all the concepts to have mechanical symmetry. i actually cut out an idea for a later puzzle because having another minigame with wholly different mechanics might dampen the concision (is that a word?) of the ending.

my design decision for informing the player was to have a path that leads to the first "gaomono," which points you at a different platform where a second one is pushing a third one off of a ledge, which they'd only fall off from when the background chord stopped, which demonstrated the mechanic in realtime from safety. the gaomono are also shaped like speakers when they roar, and their waves look like a speaker icon you might see in your digital devices when altering the volume. i was going for more intuitive mechanics, but i also had all the TVs facing up and down where there were audio splitters you didn't have an immediate use for, which was a result of the time crunch, so that confused the design a bit. 

it leads you visually into thinking that you have to interact with them in some way when the real path was to the right, where broken tiles lead. in any case, i added dialogue about the volume levels/controls and that was also a crunch thing. i don't like to tutorialize too much (at all, ideally) and try to make things flow naturally, so those were what i ended up doing. it was actually pretty much entirely in hints. :'] which also sucks because i didn't have time to make it so that dialogue advances on click LOL. loads of people keep missing my dialogue. ; wwwww ;

the audio waves did have a timing issue, but it was actually because i had to change the way they worked a few days before. initially, i made it so each individual wave marked you as "floating" to prevent you from falling, and if you were no longer touching them, the death zone would trigger in a pit. but that turned out to be overly machine-dependent, so i changed it to a solid hitbox that stretches with the audio levels and was entirely dependent on reading the audio bus with the background chord that fires every other bar of music.  the issue is that before, it felt right because you had to wait for the trail of audio waves to finish before you fell, but in the activated/deactivated hitbox, you fell instantly after the background chord cuts off even if there are audio waves on the screen. not many people have pointed it out, but i do think it's unfair and would be a poor design choice to leave in, so i'll definitely address that and i'm sure it'll feel better. but for people who aren't musically inclined, i'll be sure to add some kind of flash to keep them in time.

the game was designed to be one and done unfortunately, so i kept it so small that i hoped any crashed wouldn't deter a second attempt. i didn't know how to make a save and i didn't want to figure it out in the middle of developing a 10 minute game with 2 minutes of gameplay so lmao. there is actually one redundant checkpoint, a second TV after the first splitter, but you don't actually need to activate it, most people neglect to. T w T

you make some salient points!!! i'm definitely addressing them when i develop more for the game. i was just crunched to hell as the only coding dev. :'3 i was doing all the 2D art and acting as director/producer for my team while supplementing their own work in music and 3D as well.