Oh they're on UE4 these days, with 5 in early access. But that's fair, use whatever works best for you.
As for the other. It's one of those things where the fault pretty much always lies with the dev. If players are missing what you added, it means you didn't present your idea in a way the player picked up. But hey don't feel too bad, one of my game's two major mechanics was actually cited as a bug versus a feature. The awkward part is, you actually need it to win so people just thought even the first area was unbeatable, and thus never played the other 10 areas, nor fought any of the 6 bosses. Oops.
//shrugs
Things happen. Though it was actually explained in the game, clearly not in a way the players caught (at least on average). So the fault is mine for not teaching them in a better way. A harsh lesson for next time, but that's okay. This isn't exactly my "magnum opus", it's a one month game jam game I tried waaaaaaay too hard to be unique with. I won't fault the players for my poor game design. I'll just do better next time.
I guess it really just comes down to how you look at it. At the end of the day, no player cares about your personal challenge, they only care about if the game is fun. And if you're exceedingly lucky, a small group will be nice enough to share how they played it, offering a valuable window into the minds of your audience. You just can't be too surprised when at the front door of your game, instead of finding a key, they bash their head into it until it opens. ;)
"3. Games MUST be created using only RPG Maker MZ (either the one distributed for free during the contest, or one that you've purchased). Plugins are fine, but no other game engine may be used."
Also if you're looking to mess with other engines, I've messed with those two and Unreal Engine. UE is infinitely easier and more functional than the others in my experience. Especially as someone else who was guilty of doing something in this engine that it wasn't "intended for". I won't hype it up here though, that's just bad form. But if I had to pick from the 3, UE has my vote.
As for game stuff, personally I value the negative feedback pretty highly. That's what tells me how to improve my game... Goodness knows just getting any feedback on a game is actually pretty difficult, barring already having a following. So I'm stoked for any, be it good or bad. Honestly if I wasn't barred from updating the game, I'd have probably already done 4-5 updates by now.
I wouldn't say that, there are a lot of games in the jam. It might not even be him judging your game, the judges could have just not gotten to it yet. It's been less than two weeks, and each judge has around 30 games to go through. So I expect the first round of judging to take a bit.
Drifty said he's playing the games off stream. So if you haven't seen it streamed, he's probably judging it. The only reason I know he judged mine was the large amount of helpful feedback he provided.
