Let's jump into it!

What went well

• I was happy with the overall concept and execution, and although I only put together three levels, there was enough design space to make them interesting and different from each other.
• The visuals and polish came out well in my opinion. Dragging items around and opening and closing containers was really satisfying!
• I managed to squeeze a number of Easter eggs into the game, in the form of bootleg game titles, card game references, and references to previous projects of mine. I even made a reference to Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum, which was secretly actually a reference to @100th-coin's Super Mario TAS that involves swapping NES cartridges at mach million while telling yourself you're playing Mario.

What could have gone better

• Implementing the core system took quite a bit longer than I had hoped, especially the squashing of weird corner-case bugs for containers that contain other containers.
• The scope was smaller than I would have liked (partially because of the previous bullet). I was originally hoping to have more varied challenges and situations, or continuity between levels (like packing your suitcase, then having to take out and rearrange items while in the line for TSA).
• I can't help but feel there was something missing from the game as it currently existed. A little bit of a story, a twist mechanic, or an "aha" moment. As it is, the game flows perfectly smoothly, but there are never any moments for fireworks.
• You can't pet the cat. You can however shake her around violently while she purrs, which is most of the way there.

What went... unexpected?

This has been kind of a strange play and rate period for me, because in addition to getting players from ldjam.com, my entry was also featured on the front page of Itch.io and has received a lot of additional non-LD plays through Itch.

Which is great! But also the amount of traffic, in combination with being packaged with PyInstaller, made Windows extremely confident my game was a Trojan.

Yet another reason to have a browser build if you can! If I only had the Windows build, most people would not be able to play the game without additional scary steps of whitelisting the file in their antivirus software.

The results

I'm quite happy with my game's performance this time around! Not necessarily as exciting as some of my previous entries, but still a worthy entry.

The amount of eyes on the game this event (mostly through Itch) has been really exciting, and at times overwhelming, but I'm really happy that the feedback has been largely positive! The most common complaint by far was that the game was too short, with some people also having difficulty with the final level. It's possible I'll have to revisit this game at some point when I'm not so busy with my current project.

Speaking of which...

I'm working on a full game! I've teamed up with @daniel-alhadeff to make a deckbuiilding roguelike based on my LD52 entry, Fallowtide. If you're interested in geometry puzzles or card games, check it out! A public demo is coming out next month.

Moonsigil Atlas on Steam

That's all I have, thanks everyone for making Ludum Dare such a great experience. I don't know for sure if LD58 is actually going to happen in October or not, but I'll see you all then if it does! ☃