This Game Jam was a blast! Still waiting on feedback from the Game Jam judges, but we've gotten a lot of good feedback after releasing this demo! We've taken a few days to rest and now we're looking to what's next. We're definite planning on building a bigger and better version of the game, especially with everyone's enthusiastic responses :D

First post-mortem for this game. I'm new at this so be gentle D:

Overall, I believe our personal goals for the Game Jam were met:

• This is the first Game Jam both of us have participated in. So putting our work out into the public was a major source of anxiety! We did it, so missioned accomplished! Everyone's positive feedback has also helped with our confidence!
• My personal goal was just to get something "finished". I have a bad habit of jumping between projects and never actually finishing anything, which wasn't really helping my confidence. Getting this out was a big personal accomplishment for me.
• Byzantine is a new sprite artist, so this is also the first time her creations have been seen by anyone besides our personal friend group! Umbra herself, and all the objects in the world were all created by her! The sprite-sheet we used for the world's tile-set we got from a resource pack, everything else she made (and a couple random edits by me).

So regardless of the results of this Game Jam, we're super happy with how things turned out.

As for feedback: Based on early responses, we're going to make the following changes (After the Game Jam): 

• Reducing the over all bloom levels of the lasers and increasing the ambient lighting. People like seeing the character! (A sample of the changes is attached to this post)
• Umbra is getting a light outline to make her a tad easier to see. We're also speeding her movement up. She's a bit too slow in the larger rooms where there's more moving back and forth.
• Adding a new camera mode toggle: Pressing "Space" will toggle the camera between Follow Mode and overview mode.
  • Follow Mode is a closer, and more cinematic view of the game. It is locked to Umbra as she moves.
  • Overview Mode is the current setup where the camera zooms out to encompass the entire puzzle room. It also increases the strength of the outline on Umbra to make her more visible.
• Reworking the Tutorial progression:
  • A few more steps in the tutorial section to better teach the player on how certain mechanics work. Especially windows and how they block Umbra (or not).
  • A whole new section teaching color theory: Light filters are somewhat unintuitive at times, so a new section will give better examples on how different colors light mutate as they move through filters.
• Reworking the rotation controls to make them more responsive when doing fine adjustments.

We have a lot more changes planned, but they're more... well, things we wanted to put in this version but simply didn't have time to. More puzzles, for one thing. While we want to keep the game fairly relaxed, we do want to add some more hazards and complexities to the game.