I appreciate the detailed feedback!

You hit the nail on the head with wishing there was more gameplay; both the other programmer and I spent half of the jam making the game feel juicy to play (head impact FX, ending sequence + scene transition animations, background panning, etc), and half of the jam making the dang stairs work, haha. The end product feels more like a funny physics simulator than an actual game to me.

There originally was a hard fail state where if you bonked once, it was game over and you had to restart. In practice, it felt pretty frustrating to have to redo the whole game to get back to whatever flight of stairs you reached before, especially given how chaotic and difficult it is to control the character as it goes on.

We could have lowered how much the difficulty ramps up to account for this, or incorporated a lives system (someone on the team pitched the idea of the character wearing X amount of helmets that visually stacked above her head which represented how many lives she had, but we didn't have time), but we ultimately decided we wanted to mitigate player frustration by not having a hard go-back-to-the-start kinda failure state, rather there's a very loose failure state in that the game counts how many times you messed up and tells you at the end. We were also able to slap in the Infinite Stairs Mode in the last couple of hours, which does have a bonk-once-and-you-lose failure state for anyone that's interested in going for a "real" high score of some kind.

The fail state is a big consideration I'll be taking into the next jam, balancing implementing one that feels meaningful without making it too frustrating to endure, so I appreciate you bringing that up!

It didn't occur to us until reading the comments that it wasn't intuitive if Head Bonks were a good thing or a bad thing 😅

Originally in the main mode, you'd lose outright if you ever bonked X amount of times, which made it clear you should avoid that but it ended up being frustrating to have to replay the entire game for making mistakes, especially considering how chaotic and hard it is to control the character towards the end.

So we removed the lives system and just made it count how many bonks you accrued. It's occurring to us now that the goal of arcade-y games is to typically make a number go up, so that being a number that goes up intuitively seems like it means you should shoot for more head bonks, haha. Maybe a funny thing we could have done was name it "Head Integrity" or something, and it starts at 3 and subtracts 1 on every head hit, but then keeps going past 0 into the negatives.

Anyway thanks for the feedback :) big lesson learned about being more thoughtful with making the player's goal intuitive!