Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We had wanted to add some additional crafting elements with the various resources, but the ideas didn't work out into anything fun. We scrapped the crafting, but never got around to reducing the resources further. Originally there were more and we already had a pass at reducing the number.
Yeah, our last rebalance dropped the difficulty too much. We are trying to find the right balance of challenge and complexity for a jam submission, and favored too easy.
I agree that you shouldn't try to make the perfect game for everyone, but for a jam it does help to favor a being a bit easier/more accessible, to allow more people to be able to at least play the first few minutes to rate. We start by making the game we want, then try to find a good balance of difficulty. We often fail and end up too easy, but after the jam we can always continue working on it. For us, the jams are all about the feedback, and experimenting with things we might not otherwise get to do. Ratings are nice, but we often find there are a few really good comments that are worth more than everything else in helping us make better games.
As for the number of ratings, wow this jam has been great for us. We normally don't get close to 20 ratings in a GWJ until the end of the week, and go rate more games in hopes of staying above the median. This jam has been far more active early on than we recall any of the previous ones we've been in. I don't know how Itch's system works, but I do think that your past activity may have something to do with how you are positioned in the default listings. We've done several GWJs now and a number of other jams, and we are very active in rating and commenting in them, so I think that has helped a lot compared to our first where we were wondering what we were doing wrong, but had not accumulated any of what I will call global karma. This is just my guess, mind you. Also, there is a bit of "karma" in doing the same jam multiple times and having other jammers recognize you and want to play your games. We also play, rate, and comment on as many games as we can. Good comments on their submission can do a lot to encourage some people play your game. For GWJ our normal goal is to do at least 40 before switching to only reciprocating for those who rate and comment on ours. It also helps to play a bunch the first day or two so people have time to fit playing your game into their schedule. After the first day, you may want to sort by Karma, and play the higher rated ones, as those are the people actively rating other games. Still, we only expect about half of the ones we rate to reciprocate, based on past experience.
