Oh when I mean quality of life stuff that I would’ve enjoyed more, I mean like assigning a cat to go from oven to window seems like it should cover other ovens when standing around waiting for its own to finish, or any other deliver this thing to that place assignment. I can see the argument for that being an intentional design decision, but there’s no easy way that I could tell to find out which of multiple identical stations a cat was assigned to which would’ve helped alleviate that. Being able to pull trays off a maxed out oven might be nice too, even if it meant dumping them.
I agree you made the right call on not requiring the player to micromanage and from some of the points you’re making (all of which I agree with) it seems like you may have gotten the opposite meaning from what I was trying to say. It felt confusing because the game seemed to be communicating that that it was going to require micromanagement from me, which I didn’t want and was relieved to see wasn’t the case. Tip #1 even shows sending a cat to get food as an example of the kind of job you would want to assign to them. Since there were stations for two of the three bars that I could assign the cat to and no obvious way to get the cat to recover fun, it caused the stress of “how do I meet this need?” instead of knowing the cat would magically pull some yarn out of nowhere. If you had instead removed the ability to micromanage the cats at all outside of kitchen work, then that would have clearly communicated that it’s not expected behavior. Incidentally I think being able to manually pull out some string and play with the cats by dragging it around with your mouse might’ve been a great way to give the player something to do while waiting, make their fun recover faster and they purr and get a speed boost to work, or whatever.
I think the incentive structure of a jam makes slower, more methodical games discouraged because the typical voter is trying to play through as many as they can and that’s a tough challenge to overcome. I definitely wish the game had ran while not focused on the window, I would’ve left it up while playing through others!