So my jam game went well! Good feedback, I stumbled onto a fun idea, and the setting has some kind of gravitational pull for me. So, I've decided to make it into a little game.

Now, I figure best way to start is by divining what I thought went well, and not so well with the jam version:

Yay

• So I somehow managed to pull together a lot of strands and make a pretty well-rounded game: Ink let me get a short bit of story into it, DoTween is still one of the best packages every made (buy it!), and I got a nice atmosphere in the form of a 3D background + PostProc effects for the loop
• Playtesting from friends & nice folks helped to find some key bugs, and help with tutorialising the game. If I didn't ask for playtests, the game would've been a lot more obtuse than it (still) is
• I've got a good base mechanic for a good puzzle game: one that is fairly easy to learn, and has lot's of possibilities for messing with it (e.g. what if you had a flipped node? one that's fixed and ticks down to being broken?)

Aww

• The game is still somewhat overwhelming at first
• Drag-drop is ok, but for the frenetic levels it can be a pain - from trying to grab them, to having to hold down as you drag. This can be a lot better (and pretty easy to implement the fixes too)
• I think the game is a little obscure with how long nodes take - in a way that's not bad, it keeps it mysterious and you need to do some trial-and-error to figure out how to fix a level. But I want to reference games like Golf Peaks, where you can plot out exactly how every action works. Now that's going to be a bit tricky - I want obscurity but want it to be transparent? Huh? Well I'll work that out later

Overall the response is good, and I have plenty of ideas. More importantly I can pretty easily 'see' what I need to do in order to extend/improve the game, and the coding/refactoring required isn't that hard. So here we go! Let's make a game.