Our target “audience” is someone that wants a slightly stressful challenge that tests your ability to maintain situational awareness and react with urgency to escalating system malfunctions. In our game, you only need to manage an increasingly escalating crisis scenario for 15.5 minutes to achieve victory. You’re almost guaranteed to fail on your first attempt (and that can happen as early as 3-5 minutes into it.) Once you understand the mechanics and how to interact with the consoles, you are almost guaranteed to succeed if you can maintain your focus during the final minutes – and if this type of challenge is something you crave.
Participating in the rate4rate is really nice, but what we are hoping for more than just ratings are constructive criticisms that are more contextually useful for the type of game we created and the type of player audience we want to attract. Most of the rate4rates are a copy/paste race to the most ratings, it seems.
Are there unwritten rules about what does/does not constitute a good “jam” submission? I get that the most likely creators to “win” the jam are those that appeal to the widest audience… but what if “winning the jam” isn’t the primary reason we participate? If we do this so that we can learn, test our limits, support our community of other devs, and get genuinely useful feedback, then the general rate4rate race isn’t very helpful, for us.
Our submission was intentionally created to be somewhat overwhelming on the first attempt to play. It was designed and carefully tested for balance to almost ensure the player would die during their first attempt, unless they really picked up on the systems at play and how to correct their failing states. When we had play testers try it out prior to the deadline, we fine-tuned the game environment to help future players have a better chance at absorbing the necessary information to help them succeed on their 2nd or 3rd attempt, even first if they can read really fast. But the play testers that tried our game happen to be among the target audience that we were targeting.
What we would really love now, more than just a bunch of ratings, is more players that fit the criteria of our target audience to give our game a genuine play test, and provide us with your solid feedback for areas of improvement and areas where we did well. We would like to be rated on the jam categories with -context- to the type of game we made. Obviously we are going to get low ratings in “enjoyment” and “gameplay” if most of the people testing our game are searching for a totally different kind of game to play. They will consider ours frustrating, stressful, and too difficult to understand. That’s understandable if what they are looking for are 2D platformers, casual puzzle games, turn-based RPGs, etc. I can’t fault anyone for wanting to play games in the specific genres they find most rewarding. It just not as useful to get a lot of feedback from players that would normally never even try a game like ours… because it doesn’t help us make our game better for our target audience.
IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR – We would love for you to play test and rate other games that appeal to a similar target audience, as well as other 3D browser games in general. Thank you for your time.
And finally, I want to name my top 2 favorites *so far* from this jam: Reactor4 (for the mood and play style) https://jnsdv.itch.io/reactor4 and Yak Shaving Space Delivery (for being a delightfully silly 3D task-oriented game) https://koalalorenzo.itch.io/yak-shaving-brackeys-13