I'm glad a lot of people played our game, but our ratings suggest that it was not liked by any standard. Much less than any other game I've made. Thinking it was my best game jam game yet, I wanted to find out what the disconnect was between my friends/me and everybody else, learn more about gamers that are outside of my personal group of friends, and learn more about good game design. In a comment thread somewhere else, The Omicron Fleet creator @cerno-b gave us some very valuable feedback regarding our game's ratings, which I think I can summarize with one of the paragraphs he wrote. He asked me to make this new post to further discuss my game.

I think what happened is that people started your game, played around with it a bit, failed to make any progress and gave up. Since they did not experience the whole game, they left a lackluster comment and gave you a mediocre rating. This could also explain the low score in music. They simply did not play the game long enough to appreciate it. It is possible that the one single flaw of somewhat unpolished controls brought your whole game down, which is a pity since you nailed the theme, the graphics were very pleasing and I mentioned how much I liked your score.

I'm not good at games, physically. I have a neurological disorder and don't have any fine motor control in my hands. I'm very clumsy and don't like games that require any skill. But I have always liked what people consider REALLY DIFFICULT games. I love Cuphead, 1001 Spikes, and every brutal puzzle game I can get my hands on. I don't think those require skill, just thought. The act of stopping for a second before hitting restart. The thing that has fascinated me the most about games, since I was a kid, is a non-verbal narrative you can establish with a player, which can lead to them realizing that if you were able to establish this logic-based narrative with them, that they might also share that bond with the rest of society. That last part is the moving thing about games to me, not the explicit gameplay stories themselves. Jonathan Blow gave a really amazing talk about this at PAX East a few years ago where he actually mentions two of my favorite games (and his game The Witness is my official favorite game):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwBl7Rnkt78

That narrative can really only be established if you can't complete something thoughtlessly. If you can beat a level through physical prowess alone, you haven't been captured in conversation.

Now, all that being said, and explaining the type of games I'd like to make-- that doesn't by any means suggest that I succeeded. Even if for some reason my game is now more fun to somebody after explaining that, a game shouldn't require an explanation like this to achieve entertainment, or even validity. Those other games I mentioned have 90%+ ratings on Steam and don't require any explanations. Clearly, I'm missing some elements here.

Our entry for "Sacrifices Must Be Made" was a game where a trio of stuffed animals trapped in a lab must try to escape. Each animal controls differently. One is well rounded and perceptive, one is faster/agile/better at jumping, and one is slow and stable. But the characters need to lose weight in order to outpace evil robot sentinels. You have to make a decision to rip off either their legs (able to only jump), their arms (much worse balance), or tear out their eyes (obfuscated visuals.) I was hoping some fun would come from trying to figure out which combinations were the most effective, since the character qualities AND the effects of the sacrifices are listed in game during your choices (and feel like I'm beating somebody over the head with what decision to make), but I also wrote the strategy guide on the itch.io page, which explicitly tells you the easiest sacrifice to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUTThEnC-XE

Regardless of any combination, I did keep the controls as responsive as possible, with almost no ramp up time to full movement velocity, and very little ramp down time after releasing a movement key. The instability sacrifice does create small random movements and slightly randomizes the velocites of all movement, but this is attenuated enough by the one character's stability that it is the best sacrifice for that character. Ripping off the legs does significantly increase accuracy and handling with the jumping mechanics, and the visual obfuscation is much less intense on the thoughtful character. We didn't try to purposely make it difficult at any point-- you have infinite lives and can either restart a level by pressing Ctrl/Alt/Gamepad B, or choose a new sacrifice by pressing Y/PgDown. Without key presses, there's only about 2.5 seconds between making a lethal mistake and being back in the level. We just wanted it to be impossible to thoughtlessly plow through and actually require some consideration and analysis of the interactions between explicit character stats and explicit sacrifice nerfs. (I would have preferred for the player to think for themselves what effect tearing off legs or eyes might have, as I think guessing those correctly would provide a profound sense of achievement, but seeing as how most people were still choosing incorrect combinations, that's the furthest thing from possible I think.)

During the jam, I'd post builds on Facebook and a few friends were beating it with the harder combinations in just a few lives (on the more difficult jam level vs the level we put in our next day non-jam version after we started getting complaints on LD about the difficulty), but we generally only made it slightly easier here and there from then on. Like I said, I'm terrible at game controls, but the gameplay on our trailer is a single take where I beat the game in one life, and was the first take I tried recording. It doesn't strike me as a difficult game, but even if it was, I'm still baffled as to why we got such low scores in every category, especially since we provided cheat codes to play all the characters, and a trailer that showcases the entire content of the game. Is part of this because people who know me personally already know what types of games I like playing and making and then approach new games of mine differently? I don't want this to come across as somebody receiving criticism of an element of something they've made and then saying "well, I meant to do that", but hopefully I've explained what I wanted to succeed at doing and I want to get more input about how I missed the mark on that.

I'd like to take this opportunity of receiving a bad score to learn more about what else went wrong though too. I am incredibly grateful for the few people who put a lot of effort into their feedback, specifically @cerno-b and @birdwards. I know quite a few things that could use tweaking, but if difficulty is the element that caused a disaster, I'm very interested in learning more about how to make a game both fun AND impossible to beat without minimal strategizing.