Lotus Well by LDJam user 382954
"Habitually do I sound the depths of human hearts.
Some stretch cloudless to the horizon -
while others know only the drumbeat of rain."


Description
This is a (~~probably~~ very hardcore) puzzle game made for LD57, the theme is Depths, and it belongs to the COMPO category.
All of the game art, music, etc. are made by myself.
I used Godot 4.4 as the game engine, drew with SAI2, made simple animations with Aseprite, and wrote BGM in Bandlab (although it was just a jumble of a few notes). The main part of the game took about 40h to complete. Ah. Dead tired (> <)
Anyway it's a tiny story about the depth of one's heart. There are currently five chapters. It takes 1-2 hours to complete all of them. If you can't solve some of these puzzles, check out the comments section of itch's page for hint!
Hope you enjoy it ૮₍ ˃̶ ꇴ ˂̶ ₎ა

| Link | https://github.com/AlyName/LD57 |
| https://alyname.itch.io/ld57 | |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/lotus-well |
Ratings
| Overall | 51th | 3.875⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 133th | 3.397⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 29th | 4.017⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 177th | 3.431⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 2th | 4.583⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 59th | 3.741⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 163th | 2.615⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 29th | 4.103⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
Anyway, hope you enjoyed it !(〃’▽’〃)
My concern is that if I tell the player all the mechanics from the beginning, will it make the game seem a little... Monotone? That way, the player can even plan where to go right at the beginning of the level, and it feels like a lot to lose... feelings of "fun" and "unknown"? (Or probably my ideas are just too hardcore and not fun (x
I'm trying to work out the resolution issue and the scaling of the game window itself. Hope it helps. Thanks for your valuable feedback!
With all of that I think having an undo mechanic for the last move or if after resting you could see all the tiles you already interacted with would be nice (so you can plan moves up to your failure, and not for the whole level), although I don't hold it against you for not having it in the jam, you still had a very good entry.
One thing I forgot to mention is that sometimes the text disappeared, or weirdly appeared when I was concentrated on the puzzle and I didn't get to read it (if there was any, sometimes it felt like just the image?)
Also Also, I'm not sure if it's just me but the music hint wasn't helpful, I did have some music in school but don't remember anything and the only thing I noticed is that one note and the clue had # in them
Managing to fix them in a post-jam update now ...
My adhd ass cant wait this those looong transitions between levels. Need a skip feature for me
The running animation at the beginning looked great!
One thing I would suggest to improve this entry, is more focus on designing cleaner early puzzles to help the player learn the mechanics easier. Make fewer levels overall and improve the quality of each level instead. I found it a little tedious to solve the puzzles, as once I figured out what had to do, it was a lot of clicks to accomplish it.
Additionally, I would’ve liked some small audio feedback for each tile interaction. The paper plane was very cute though! Do more of that!
On the minus side, unfortunately I got stuck on the second level:( I would like to finish the game, it was a lot of fun. It showed that I lit 6/7 books, however I managed to light them all, I don't know why the last one didn't count no matter how hard I tried.
Anyway, the game is super duper cool! You can be proud of yourself dude🔥 I shake your hand, huge kudos to you and good luck with your next projects👍
@dumchevdev Fixed the possible bugs. (If the same issue do appears again, a RESET can probably solve it?)
I tried to pass the 4th puzzle several times, but I couldn’t, because every time I reached a certain point, made a mistake and had to go through the whole puzzle again. It would be easier for me if it was possible to undo the action a couple of steps back. But this does not make the game worse overall. A great game on LD.