I feel the same, and almost made a similar post for my own game.

first thoughts on your game are that I feel bad that tv channel manager happened to be the most oversaturated genre on this jam (I think I personally play at least 5 games that had channel management and multiple days, and i only played about 30 of the 160 that were there), so independent of your quality you had to deal with the people who played multiple games probably feeling burnt out. 

-really appreciated the tutorial you made. I didn't really get what I was supposed to do the first playthrough, but once I realized the actors had a type it was pretty clear what I needed to do. Definitely would need more mixups/wild cards/ disadvantages ect if you were to make a full game with the mechanics. the downside of advertising never really offset the benefits of firing all your buppets each day (terrible boss i know) and getting what is needed and fully upgrading them. my second playthrough I had full viewership at all times despite rolling any ad break by day 7, so I'd make mad bank, roll for $70 buppets, max them out and get massive numbers no downsides guaranteed.

-I couldn't find the credits, so I couldn't tell if you had an artist, or did the art and music yourself. I would say there's an issue that the illustrations are very charming, nice and well made, but the use of colors in the background that were nearly similar values and just as colorful as the sprites, and the crt effect(which I do like) they look too noisy and don't mesh with the presentation. The music that plays through the majority is way to short of a loop (that doesn't loop at a satisfying point) and is very atari-ish. The song you have at the intro screen maybe should have been what you stuck with for the whole thing. I went back and let it play and it fits the vibe better, even was a more satisfying loop.

-I love incremental growth games, and I think the core idea was very strong, I could completely see how with polish and extra oomph you could get a balatro esque game where deciding on keeping or firing characters has big risk reward, and planning around engine building that gives big numbers is the goal

I love digging deep into design, so feel free to ask if there's something else you feel you need feedback

I didn't get the chance to try your game during the voting phase, but after trying it now, I have some things to say.

First of all, you doomed yourself from the beginning by making a management game. This type of game is extremely hard to get right in such a small amount of time. Menu-based games also look boring and need a lot of polishing to look and feel "fun."

The overall game progression felt frustrating because as soon as you upgrade a character, people get bored of them. In "deck-building games" like this, it's weird to force the player to just sell their cards constantly, it defeats the entire purpose of building a deck.

And yes, the music is fine but very repetitive.

I saw a comment where you said that you want to keep working on this game to get it right. I would personally advise you not to do that. If you want to keep improving, it's better to just move to the next project. Then in the future, if you want, you can remake this game from the ground up.

So, to summarize: bad game genre choice in my opinion, but everything else seems pretty good.

Hi! Just wanted to drop my two cents here since I really enjoyed your game and thought it was one of the standouts of the jam, I’d say for its presentation if anything. I’ll try to make my points brief but relatively in depth. And do keep in mind that I enjoy game design discussion but am in no way a professional so take my comments with a grain of salt:

• Audio / Visual: I think your game was one of the games with the most charming visual style. I think any low ratings in these two category are mostly due to the fact that most of the game takes place in the menus, which are visually clear for gameplay, but otherwise not too fancy. In terms of audio, I think the music was nice, but since the music really only changes between the management menu and shop menu, I can see why some voters might rate lowly just because the audio didn’t stand out to them, or maybe got boring after a while. The management menu music in particular did kind of drone on, especially considering that’s where you spend most of the game. Having varied music per day may have helped in this regard (although again game jams are very time limited so I can totally understand why this wasn’t a concern during development).

• Creativity / Theme Use: These were the highest ratings, and I can see why. The concept of a Muppets inspired game is unique in general, and really unique in the context of the jam. I also think the theme comes through pretty well since everything in the game is very TV related, from the premise to the terminology like popularity and ratings. I have no major notes here, and I doubt anyone rated this category poorly unless it wasn’t in good faith.

• Entertainment: I think this is probably the main area for improvement. I think a lot of people didn’t really know exactly how to quantify “Entertainment”, so this category became a “rate low if the game was frustrating” thing, and I think a lot of people probably got frustrated by the gameplay loop, not because it’s bad, but because the design is inherently complex. You have to spend some time failing and experimenting to figure out what strategies work, which can be disheartening since the game has 10 days and restarts to day 1 upon failure. Furthermore, I think the winning strategy here is deceptively unintuitive. Many people (myself included) probably wanted to keep their best synergies, and weren’t aware at first how much score you’ll miss out on by reusing tired Buppets, so they lost fairly early and probably thought they needed to try different Buppet synergies instead of swapping out tired Buppets. This is a gameplay quirk that can be worked around or even embraced as a feature, but in a game jam where people really want to play and beat the game in 20-30 minutes tops, many players may chalk the failures up to poor game design or imbalance. Honestly, I think for a game jam, the best way to fix an issue like this is to give players an out if they get too frustrated, either via a hint system, checkpoints, toggleable infinite lives / god mode / easy mode, or just designing your game to be easier without sacrificing any complexities you still want your game to have. Of course, some low ratings here are bound to just be due to some players simply not vibing with the gameplay loop or genre, but I wouldn’t worry about that since that’s bound to happen. I myself enjoyed the gameplay a fair bit, and while there’s always room to improve a game, I don’t think your game was particularly unfair or broken, just maybe a little too difficult.

• Duck: I wouldn’t really worry about this rating. It’s kinda superfluous and doesn’t mean much. People probably rated lowly on this because they may not have seen the duck Buppet in their playthrough and just gave it 1 star since they didn’t see a duck anywhere.

TLDR:

• Visual style was cool but the menus didn’t show it off enough
• Audio was nice but droned on after a while due to lack of variance
• Creativity was good; the Muppets theming was unique and fun
• Theme Use was also good; the TV theming was present throughout
• Entertainment was probably low because people got frustrated with the difficulty and confused on why they lost
• Duck was low probably because some players didn’t see the duck Buppet

At the very least, this is by interpretation of what I think players could have thought when playing your game. So again, take it with a grain of salt, but hope you can get something out of this feedback. Again, I really enjoyed your game in many aspects, so thanks for participating!