Thanks for trying it out, and for your thoughts!
My friend & brother helped me on this project during the jam, so thanks to them we were able to bounce ideas around and settle on the claw machine concept a couple hours after the jam started; without them, I might have been very lost with the theme as well. But one of the great things about the GMTK Jams's themes is that there is always room for interpretation, so there ends up being a lot of cool variety with the submissions. That's partly why we were so excited for this to be our first jam collab! We knew that there would have to be some opportunity to put a fun twist on more traditional game paradigms, regardless of the theme.
I'm glad you like the laser feature - I hope we can improve it a bit in a future update (especially to work more consistently on the web export version), but I'm happy enough with it as-is. This was actually partially inspired by the classic UFO catcher Mario Party minigame.
We'll definitely try to make the reset functionality more obvious if we do another update! But the main goal would be to make it so the claw can extend all the way to the floor consistently, so players wouldn't need to reset as often, if ever.
We were actually planning on having a lot of voicelines! My brother recorded a fair few during the jam period (both for the machine itself, and npcs), but during the 48 hours I sadly wasn't able to add them in due to the time crunch. After the jam ended and I was able to listen through them more carefully, I realized that there were a few things we could adjust to make them work much better in the game, so I decided not to add them just yet in our minor bugfix update. He's a busy guy, but I'm hoping to make some time to record updated lines and use them in a future update! He can bring a lot of character to the machine, and with the right bitcrush filters it should sound very fitting. This is a sample of one of the lines he recorded that might not need to be adjusted at all.
And I love the idea of having some basic face animations when certain events happen, I'll definitely keep that in mind!