RUN AS ADMIN (Demo)

I got all Administrium after around 4-5 hours

• Level platformer_101: 22.453s
• Level 1: 11.450s
• Level 2: 9.884s
• Level 3: 7.683s
• Level 4: 9.748s
• Level 5: 12.535s
• Level 6: 9.249s
• Level notepad: 15.768s
• Level 7: 10.511s
• Level solar_paint: 18.297s
• Level 8: 16.017s
• Level 9: 13.985s
• Level 10: 15.816s
• Level 11: 20.315s

• I didn’t enjoy the the hourglass mechanic as it constantly got in the way when playing, especially with the pen. The times where it was necessary always felt extremly finicky and just straight up annoying trying to line up at mach 2 speed, and I’m guessing you feel it too since you added a skip to level 3 that bypasses all use of it. I would suggest changing it so the hourglass slides down slopes and narrowing its collider, as that would leave some margin of error. If you want more gameplay out if it, then it could also be changed to have a downwards dash. Dashing down into a hyperlink could even act the same as jump-dashing into one. Tapping down while hyperlink gliding could also dash down out of it.

• Every part of the direction buttons felt really inconsistent, as I often felt that the buttons didn’t replenish my dash. Button chains would also constantly stop with the wrong input. I ended up just letting go of the movement keys when initiating one.

• Hyperlink gliding confused me in the beginning as they just seemed slower than dashing, but learning the trats felt nice. I did however have 2 pain points related to them. 1st was level 5 when gliding into the direction buttons. It just felt really inconsistent and generally didn’t feel like my fault when failing. I would probably just have the buttons activate automatically when gliding into them as you’re technically already holding the dash button. 2nd was when trying to jump-dash onto a link one block above you. Its possible but almost never worked and was really annoying trying to get right, and sometimes when you got it the hand wouldn’t grab onto the link. The issue was only really a problem on the first pillar in level 6 as you would already be under the link. Level 9, espessially at the end, technically has the same issue but the space before the links made it feel more consistent and therefor more like your own fault. If it’s a mechanic you wanna keep the I would probably just lower the first pillar in level 6 by 1 block. If not then you could probably just move the bottom of the grab collider up a little bit.

• Dash-jumping is faster when no direction keys are held. I assume this is known based on some of the level designs, but I’d argue it’s unintuitive and also leads to this weird scenario where you’re afraid to touch the movement keys,

• Text blocks fit really well as part of the entire aesthetic but I really didn’t like them as a mechanic. They’re finicky and often either don’t attach or don’t let you go when you want to. Using spacebar as the key to move text, while fitting thematically, felt weird to me. If instead the dash key was used, then the jump could work as a consistent way to let go of text. This might also just be a me problem, but swapping between the return key and spacebar to tap faster felt inconvenient, which this would also solve.

• The drawing mechanic is really, really cool and a wonderful idea. The hourglass did often mess with the flow which was annoying, but that’s not the pens fault. My only minor issue with the pen was how laggy the momentum felt when moving between drawing surfaces, maybe a 0.5s grace period with no drag could help smooth it out a little. I wasn’t able to consistently get the shortcut in level 10 but that’s probably just a skill issue.

• This is a minor thing, but the timer is weird. In the levels it’s counting down as a timelimit, but then your score is the time it took to complete. This makes it pretty hard keep track of. It’s also just that, a timer. An idea to tie it more into the theme could be to show it as a file transfer or delete dialog. Then you could have a progress bar for the remaining time and a total time elapsed stat.