Your criticism is entirely fair. I don’t enjoy playing this one either. In fact, I’ve never been interested in the genre, and my only contact with it is seeing Samsai play a couple of these games on his streams. I get why people get hooked on them, but they’re not my drinking vessel of hot beverage. I also enjoy our previous jam games a lot more.
That said, this jam was another success for me personally: I got to write some bad code I won’t have to maintain and solve interesting problems I’ll never encounter in my day job. I didn’t get to write any silly prose or doodle more than a few tiny sprites this time, but that’s okay.
By the way, making the game “get to the point faster” would actually be the opposite of what we had planned. The idea, at least in my mind, was that you’d need to actually get good at it to ever reach the disappointing but inevitable conclusion. If you played well, you’d reach the expected power trip phase before things start to fall apart. Ideally you’d come in feeling like a proper hero and go away knowing that you achieved nothing of value. That it just wasn’t worth it, at all. You know, like war in general. Apologies for any hurt feelings, war enthusiasts!
We never had time for proper balancing and a lot of our plans had to be scrapped due to time constraints. But that’s casual jamming for you I suppose. As it is, there’s not enough build-up for the (anti)climax to make an impact, and getting there is tedious at best. But seems like some people actually had fun with the game so I guess it could be worse. :)