I think polishing my prototype was making my core loop feedback worse
Just spent 40 minutes tweaking a tiny walk cycle and then it hits me, I still have no idea if the jump actually feels good. which is dumb, but yeah. I attached a quick comparison from the prototype and honestly it made the problem pretty obvious. one version looks polished enough to drop into a devlog. cleaner sprite, nicer tiles, better colors. the other version is straight up ugly. placeholder character, janky blocks, no real animation. just jump, land, collect, dodge, repeat.
Sooo weird, the ugly one got better feedback😂.
People actually stopped talking about visuals and started saying useful stuff likelanding felt floaty, dodge timing was off, collect loop got boring after a few minutes.
i used Combos for the throwaway build mostly because i wanted something playable fast before i talked myself back into sprite cleanup. not trying to replace a real engine. just enough to test the loop. starting to think pretty prototypes can hide weak mechanics for way too long. So for you folks making mechanic-heavy stuff , do you test ugly first, or still polish a little before showing anyone?