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As soon as you choose to invest in making money for how many seconds you have left the entire game loop is trivialized and you can buy all upgrades every round by just hightailing to the exit and ignoring the pickups. There was no possibility of failure when I closed the game with over $1000 on floor 46. There's some math behind making a game like this work and having scaling difficulty match well with your scaling power that I'm sure you can find some good tutorials on for next time you make a game like this one, but it's also important to make sure your mechanics and modifiers work together and complement one another rather than against each other. A modifier that gave me more cash if I managed to collect everything or gave me a lumped sum that subtracted a dollar for each upgrade left on the board would have pushed me to engage more with the core game and think about my build rather than checking out as soon as the amount of money I made outpaced the cost of new upgrades.

That said, you got me to play a game with a fundamentally broken economy for over 30 minutes because it just felt so damn juicy and satisfying to play, so big props on game feel. Keep making games!

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Thanks for the honest feedback. I think I really got my priorities wrong this jam, and neglected playtesting for polish. Because of this, I completely overestimated my scaling and how it would perform keeping the player in check and eventually ending their run, leading to most runs scaling into crazy numbers until breaking via bugs I never thought the player would encounter. I’m glad you pointed this out because it was a pretty big mistake that did significantly hurt the game. 

I also didn’t think synergies through enough. For example, “Clock speed” ($ for time remaining at the end of a level) actively incentives reaching the exit as fast as possible instead of rewarding exploration and pushing your luck. This trivialises the game significantly, especially since it’s so impactful of an upgrade.

Because of this, I am considering making a post jam build addressing these issues so I appreciate your suggestion, as it does help me think through why I added an upgrade. At its core, an upgrade should help encourage the player to interact with the gameplay loop with rewards rather than pushing them away. Many of the upgrades actually remove from the game so they will certainly be getting changed to complement each other.

I’m glad to see sacrificing the balance wasn’t all for nothing as I was quite proud of the polish at the end so I’m happy that other people found it satisfying!

Thanks for leaving such an in-depth comment. Although critical, it is definitely valid and I would rather critical comments than positive ones. Mistakes are how you improve, right? I will definitely be taking what you said into account. Thanks again!

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Absolutely. Keep at it! Interested to see how the post-jam build plays out! Give me a holler when it's out and I'll definitely give it a play :)