Nice write-up. It's heart-rending to read an article about coming to terms with the fact that project you poured your soul into didn't work out (I've certainly

Nice write-up. It's heart-rending to read an article about coming to terms with the fact that project you poured your soul into didn't work out (I've certainly been there). The control system would doom this game for me. Squishy, indirect controls means a lot of frustration. The fact it is the central idea around which the entire game is designed doesn't help. I think that's exacerbated by the visual design. It looks good, but a critical part of the mechanic is the ball ("seed"), is being rolled up a wall. You should intuitively see and understand the danger of a hole, the presence of obstacles, things you can roll up or roll down or over or through. But everything is flat and has almost uniform visual weight. There are some 3D cues, but they aren't consistent and don't seem to directly match the mechanical geometry. It's tough to read the environment. This makes the indirect unresponsive controls even more frustrating: even when you can get the ball to roll where you want, you have a hard to seeing what you want to roll toward or avoid.