Hi everyone!

I'm not sure who all will see this for my little game, but I got a lot of uplifting comments on my submission page. So who knows, MAYBE I have a few fans now ;D. Anyways, the ratings have officially come out for the jam, I've been looking forward to these all week! And to be honest? I ranked a lot lower than I thought I would. 70th out of 340 isn't awful, but I was really proud of what I had accomplished and thought 40th was probably the worst I could do. 

No time for moping around though! Lets discuss what went wrong, or at least what I think could be improved.

First and foremost my two biggest issues were simple. The game didn't appeal to a lot of people, and even worse: the tutorial was too hard. I got a few comments that mentioned how intuitive the game was, and one or two that even mentioned they enjoyed the tutorial, but sadly this wasn't the case with everyone. While some people picked up the control scheme instantly, I think many more didn't understand it at all and really struggled to pick it up. This is a big no-no in game jams. After rating so many games, I can say myself that if a game wasn't explained enough that I could enjoy and play it, that I would rate it lower. 

But thats okay!

What this jam really gave me was a bunch of awesome mutuals (Hi! If you're reading this now! Congrats on being some of my first game dev friends :))  and also SOO many play testers, more than I could have ever hoped for. I want to keep developing don't croak, I like the theme and the aesthetic and I think it has a lot of potential. I wanna scale it all up, so everything is more readable and so I can add more details to rooms, and I might even add a few colors. Maybe an 8 color color palette would allow me to make everything look a little more unique. I also wanna revamp the combat and add some more systems into the game, just a few! And, of course, more levels and content to come. Dungeon making was a fun process, so I'm looking forward to that too.

My biggest future quandary though is releasing it. I don't have a lot of experience releasing on itch yet, but a part of me doesn't want to release this complete revamp of Don't Croak as an update to an obscure jam game. Do you guys think it should be released as its own standalone game aside from this version? Let me know what you think.

Best, 

Mopi