Hey! No worries, I don't think most of us are professionals here lol.
I appreciate the detailed and thoughtful response and I think I completely agree with all your points!
After sleeping on the feedback I got yesterday, I really think our whole game would have done better if we carved out a little extra time for improving the visual quality/audio loop, ditching the upgrade system, and doing a little more work on conveyance to the user about their scores and how they're calculated. With a little more time and a little less initial ambition, we probably could have really nailed down some of these points better.
Others have mentioned the visual style / menu stuff being a little off, and I think that's just a quark of how teambuilding played out for this game jam specifically, but it's a fair point nonetheless and something I can try to improve on while becoming more gui-talented during solo dev projects.
I really appreciate your thoughts on the entertainment category specifically though! I think we took the tiredness/popularity system for granted and that's probably where we lost a bunch of people. (Maybe, we should have added a tip-master! :) )
I'll chalk that up to lack of conveyance overall, but fixing it would have required some time that we just didn't have ¯_(ツ)_/¯
We had landed on explaining the duck scores for the same reasons as you did, namely that it wasn't guaranteed to show up in the run and even if it did, the effect it had was only situationally advantageous. People who saw the duck buppet, probably liked the design, but we probably should have done something else to make it more prominent in the game, I think.
Thanks for your well-rounded and thoughtful feedback - I was definitely able to get some good perspective out of it!
Also, congrats again on your game! I think I mentioned it before, but out of the games I played during the jam, yours was one of my favorites :)