Showing fishy facts at Let's Glow! BART Anime Festival:

• 57 plays
• "extra" still hard for some people
• Players want a smaller offset for held pieces -- this is especially noticable with controller
• By 16:10 (10 minutes after the convention officially started), I already had 5 plays
• It's possible to softlock by yeeting a piece. A player did this with touch controls.
• VN suggestions from a player:
  • Use colors for different names
  • Change styling of dialog box based on speaker
• "stretch" has no stub
• "plug" black tile has a confusing underground; it's hard to tell that it's not connected to the black dot.
• I need speakers...
• Level select is still confusing to players, even with the play button
• I need to write more about who the characters are -- people don't know that karine is a succubus and that winter is a marine biologist.
• pressing start during a puzzle returns to level select without focusing a puzzle.
• two people asked for a way to reset the level.
• players tend to ask what the small/big icons mean
• someone thought that "leaks" had a big skill jump and stopped, but they solved "extra" easily
• analog stick input doesn't work well, i should probably use it for mouse emulation
• someone stopped playing after seeing level select
• i need more glue between the vn and puzzle sections of the game, especially diagetic glue that helps explain how the puzzle is related to the vn.
• some levels are really difficult for some players. maybe the characters can give hints?
• people really want input prompts. they keep requesting that i add them.
• a player requested that i make it easier to tell if a tile is immovable, perhaps by adding a texture.
• one player left after seeing the first line of the vn

Post-con thoughts:

• some people do manually use the play button during level select, even with controller
• people who solve "extra" easily tend to have trouble with "leaks" and those who solve "leaks" easily tend to have trouble with "extra".
• i think it's a good idea to make pinned tiles more distinct, but i can't use textures because i need that for adjacency mechanics later
• incredible number of plays for a free event, this game does well at conventions and i think it helps that this event was open to the public. the crowd had a good number of people who were just curious and not huge anime fans.
• a lot of people said the art was really cute
• a lot of people also asked if there was a steam page... but I don't have one yet :c
• people asked if the game was out already, and were generally surprised when i said it was still in development and that it has been about 6 months since i started, as they expected much longer timelines. now that i'm back home consulting my notes, i realize that it's actually only been 4 months since i started working on this fulltime, though I did start working on this slowly in July 2025...
• the people who complained that the game was too hard generally appeared to be more casual players or less video game literate (not knowing how to use a controller, or what the buttons on the controller are called)
• the people who said that the game had a really nice difficulty curve were puzzle game fans. these people also tended to play the entire demo and tried to 100% the demo.
• about two or three players complained that the minimalist aesthetic during puzzle sections was too sterile and needed to be decorated more.
• one player mentioned that they really liked the contrast between the minimalist aesthetic during puzzles and the cute drawn art in the vn sections
• the demo ending right after the last vn is a bit abrupt because the dialog transitions seamlessly into the ending dialog if the condition is triggered. i should make it so that you need to select the last dialog to finish instead of autoplaying it, and i should tell the player that it will end the demo.
• it looks like the biggest QoL thing i can add in general is more glue between the vn and puzzle sections of the game, really holding the player's hand and telling them a lot more information about how everything works.
• I need to make it more clear when levels are completed and that the player can proceed.