that's great to hear! i'm a solo dev myself but based on design docs i've seen from the big folks like id, they do a ton of meticulous planning and speaking from experience it helped me sooo much. and the things i didn't plan ended up getting either sidelined or poorly implemented. i'm glad ya'll are keeping at it, i hope it ends up coming together.

Hey, do you happen to use any free planning/organizing sites like Trello or Miro? Our dev team found a lot of use in just having a digital "board" with all of our ideas collected together so we could - for example - decide on keeping the most integral parts of our game and throwing away any of the other things that seemed too far-fetched or unneeded for our time, skill and manpower limitations.

You can use Trello to make lists like "to do", "in progress", "done" etc. that you can then fill with cards for stuff like textures, code and sound effects with all kinds of options for checklists and jobs for different members. Miro is a whiteboard-like service which lets you draw, paste images and generally visualize any of your ideas on a community whiteboard that everyone can view in real time, so you can easily share your vision with the entire team at once. Both were absolutely integral to our process, Trello especially, and I very much doubt we would've ever managed to submit a game in playable form - if at all - if we didn't have at least some kind of organization and way to track how much of our objectives were in the "done" pile by the end of a certain week of work.

But to be fair, it is absolutely important to note that you guys had a much bigger dev team and scope in general, while we only had two developers and a composer, so I absolutely do not want to make any false comparisons here. On the other hand, that might be even more reason to invest in sites like the ones pictured above, so you can be more certain of everyone being on the same page as well as having their priorities in check as well as ready on time.

I absolutely don't want to seem like I'm talking down, though. Our project was  still quite rushed at the end and definitely wasn't the perfect final result we were hoping for, but I feel like the one thing that we did do really well as a team was this synergy in planning, although again, it's much easier said and done when you basically only have 2-3 people planning the game. But whatever the case, even if unfinished, visually your game looks absolutely amazing in many aspects and has immense potential in others. I would very much be interested in seeing the final result, if you ever come around to make it! Hope this helped! :)

thanks ill try again tomorrow