The controls are very painful but the puzzles are cute

little awkward control but overall a great game！

Very awkward controls (as mentioned previously), but I think conceptually it's really nice. I can see how it would be difficult to make a hex-control based on a keyboard though, so what I'll suggest is just making buttons in the UI for it, or allow clicking to move you to a hex that's adjacent to you!

I love entries that respect my screen when loading up. So many immediately require me to go full screen. Thanks for playing nice with my laptop!


Notes:
- I like the art, both of the title screen and the tileset. How did you settle on a palette? That is always tough for me.
- 6-direction movement was difficult to grok and I had to keep thinking through very deliberately what my next button press should be (ie, from a execution POV rather than intent POV). Perhaps a rewind feature would help since the movement is so unique. I spent a few moments trying to think how I would implement hex movement on the keyboard. Maybe something like WEADZX? That forms a nice hex.
- I was pleasantly surprised by the jump mechanic. That adds a lot to the puzzle aspect. However, I found that I kept jumping off the entire map if I held buttons down wrongly. It was fun and funny at first, but became a hassle.

Overall, I was please with this little game!

controls couldve been improved by allowing the use of a mouse instead

It's funny how awkward these controls are, given that they're just a slight variation on the ubiquitous WASD setup. I think it's the sort of thing that sounds good in your head but by the time you find out first-hand how awkward it is, it's too late to change it. So it's an extra step to figure out which button to press. But even if I press the right button, sometimes the game double-inputs. And since there's no undo button, if you make a mistake, you have to start all over. Oftentimes, I knew how to solve a puzzle, but actually executing it was a tedious process.

I think the way I would have done it would be to make movement super quick (like 1/10th of a second), but require a distinct button press for each move.

There were a few good revelations about the game's mechanics, such as the way you can move the parcel to a lower height without getting it stuck. The jump mechanic was neat. I love how there's a wall hang mechanic that never gets used by any of the puzzles :P

The visuals are cute. The game has a soft palette that fits well. Nice work!

@defrag Thanks for the feedback!

For how I settled on the palette, I drew a mockup of a level in aseprite in grey-scale then pulled in premade palettes and color swapped until I found one that I felt right.

Very unique movement control! Its was not very intuitive at first glance and I have to spent some time figuring out which 2 keys are left-down and right-down, but its great puzzle laid there and its doing great!

Really love the jumping animation. It is SO great to have something spare to do when hesitating for the next move!

The hexagonal movement makes the keyboard controls not very instinctive. A clicking control pad may work better (while I know those panels always look ugly). Or just have an image of controls.

Makes me want to try my hand at hex movement! I think the having the controls be a little non-standard is part of this games charm, it would be too easy otherwise :)

I enjoyed so many aspects of this game so maybe I will start with my one gripe which was the movement sound was really intense. The good stuff: The music was a mood, so mellow and relaxing, it made the difficult control scheme manageable. I really liked the unique (to me) controls. It was fun moving around accidentally and figuring out the puzzle. The art compliments the music and the level design is a nice progression.

Very cool mellow mail delivery game. The music and art gave it a great vibe. The controls are a little hard to wrap your head around, but I don't have any great suggestions on how you could do it better on a hex grid. As it is I don't think the controls are bad, just unusual and a little hard to wrap your head around. But since the game itself has such a chill vibe, it didn't bother me too much. If I had to speed run with that control scheme, I might be complaining more, lol. Great work! Awesome compo game!

Like others have said, the controls are exceedingly difficult. I enjoy difficult games, but I felt like this was just way too difficult. When the control list UI disappeared in level 2, I just gave up. :sweat_smile:

You could have, for instance, made the controls using standard 4-directional movement. Moving just left or right moves the character left or right, but when paired with up or down movement, the character is moved diagonally. This way the controls would have been a lot easier to grasp.

Really nice game. Perfect execution. While I see and appreciate the reasoning behind controls. I was wondering, since modern keyboards are still made like it's 1874, why not something like WEADZX (this is a very small nitpick btw)

Great work overall!

Had a really hard time to adapt to the controls, which is funny given how close they are to our usual wasd habits. Still, once adapted, the rest of the game falls into place and is really nice and well executed. Simple, but pretty and effective graphics, the music is cool, and the puzzles are interesting. Well done!

A nice puzzle game! It feels a bit like a hexagonal-grid version of Sokoban, which does work really well. I liked the twist of added level verticality later on, that made me really think before doing every move.

The controls were pretty un-intuitive. Maybe it would help to map them to a more hexagonal shape on the keyboard - imagine if W on the keyboard is your character, then 2 and 3 would be the two "up" directions, Q and E would be the two "side" directions, and A and S would be the two "down" directions. Or better yet, move it one row down to use only the letter keys, and center this layout around the S key.

I liked the simple background music - it fits really well for a puzzle game, something slow and unintrusive to not distract you from solving your current level.

A very polished entry all in all! I haven't seen many puzzle games this time around, and it was a welcome change of pace from all the time-pressured deliveries everywhere else.

I'd like to +1 the comments about the control scheme, but I had fun nonetheless!

Most of the time you think about what buttons you need to press to move, xDD. On the one and it's cool, but on the other: you then fall back into the game, then you fall out again and so 100 times -- and this is already causing discomfort. That is, I would do better in such a game made controls on UI, let the game become much easier from this. Because even if I will get used to current controls in your game - i will never get pleasure from it).

But a normal game for a Compo).

Hey!

I was really intimidated by the unconventional control scheme at first, but realising that this is where the challenge for the game is made it a lot easier to get on board with. You managed to get good mileage out of such a simple mechanic and the constraints around the hex grid, I was pretty impressed. The game's presentation values (music and graphics) aren't overly impressive but what's there is solid. I didn't run into any bugs and everything needed to learn how to play the game was there, so it felt like a "complete" thing, even if it wasn't super polished, which I think is something to be proud of. The game dragged ever so slightly towards the end, but I did make it to the end.

All in all, a pretty good entry! Thanks for sharing :)