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Hey thanks for trying out our game after the jam ended and for the constructive feedback, I appreciate it!
You raise some excellent points on the game design side of things!
(I apologize in advance for the wall of text though!)


I do agree that menu based games frequently look boring and are hard to get right. I was pretty up front with my team about the flexibility of my goals before the jam started, and I made it clear that I didn't mind working really hard on whatever we decided, even if it was a "bad" idea. "Doomed" is a strong word here, I think, but what we aimed for was definitely going to be difficult and we didn't totally achieve it. My personal goal (aside from maybe getting my team's game streamed by my favorite Pizza Pasta  man) as a game dev in this particular game jam was to force myself to grow by working as part of a team and I was pretty confident from the outset that we'd run into some of the issues that we did. We had different ideas about what to make, and how to make it "fun," but I do think we came to a fairly solid core gameplay loop for our game-jam-game™ submission by the end. 

Someone already named Balatro, and that was indeed an inspiration for what we landed on in terms of game design. Some other inspirations for our game were, believe it or not, Darkest Dungeon and FNAF (FNAF stuff got dropped very early because of scope). Obviously we can't capture a lot of the magic that you'd find in any of these games in only a week with our currently amatuer skill levels (I'm speaking of myself here, using the royal 'our'... I think my team was great!) But I agree with your assessment about the frustration of discarding characters. My biggest complaint with Darkest Dungeon is that you frequently end up losing or discarding characters that you worked hard to upgrade. I think it "works" much better for that game because the whole game relies on the fact that it is "Doomed." We probably could have benefited from leaning either further or less far into the doom/gloom vibe than we did... But I will concede that the upgrades don't add much here, especially when other factors have a much greater affect on the end-of-day score. Perhaps that was in fact a huge point of frustration for people?

About continuing work: I think you're referring to this comment where I was talking about a full fledged version?
"I can't speak for the rest of my team, but I personally try to avoid doing significant post-jam work on stuff because I want the game to stay representative of what I was able to do in the timeframe of the jam at that point in time. This is my first game-jam with a team though, and if they want to improve it further, I would probably oblige since they may want to showcase their development differently."
I haven't directly asked the rest of the team, but I don't think there's a desire to do a full fledged version. I don't "want to keep working on this game to get it right",  but I'm not shutting down the idea of doing more with it either.

More to the point on your last subject: I do want to keep improving my skills and, at this point, it does look likely that I will just move on to the next project. So, no worries there, I'm asking for feedback to try and get a better feel for what I might have missed in terms of things people could have really hated about our game. In the future, I'd like to avoid falling prey to easy mistakes which would cause someone to hate a game I make.

I guess to continue your summarizing thought a little bit, I don't think I would give someone a 1-star rating on a game just because of a poor genre choice from the team. During this jam, there were games that I played but chose not to rate just because I felt that they "weren't for me." I somewhat suspect that if people felt strongly about leaving 1-star, it was probably because they felt we really messed up the execution rather than the idea. I'm sure everyone has their own opinions on what sort of qualities (or lack thereof) deserve lowest marks, but I hadn't truly considered the possibility that the premise matters much more than the execution for some players.

I digress... your feedback is thought provoking to be sure, and I appreciate it a lot! I actually consider your summarizing thought to be quite a compliment, in a roundabout sort of way. So thank you for that as well!


Side note: I just realized that you made the Mecha-Hazard game last year! That game was hilarious and I remember enjoying watching the upload of it being played! Good job and congratulations! I have not checked out your game for this jam yet, but at this point I will probably just wait until Vinny streams it :)