itch.io

Wow, thanks so much for all the awesome feedback!

• Glad you like the cat! 
• Yeah, I've gotten a lot of feedback about confusion with the controls. Thanks for speaking up about it still - the more feedback, the bet my next project can be!
• Spamming is the "go-to" approach, and cards don't matter. Basically I ran out of time to implement other things with the card faces and the table and stuff, so I scrapped those parts of the code but kept the assets and polished what I could by the deadline.
• Believe it or not, there is lore, but none of it is obvious or stated anywhere (though I did share it in another comment on the submission page if you care to read about it). But basically you're bonding with the cat by playing cards, and the more you play, the more the cat follows you around and eventually joins you at the top. You're basically using the spinning table to gain trust, and the cards are like time.spent together. But again, that's not intended to be known really, more like head canon.
• So awesome that you're playing the meta! Tons of great games there!
• I "submitted" a blank page with no game and placeholder text after the theme was announced because this is my first jam and I was nervous I wouldn't be able to figure out how to do it later. That way I could just drop the link to my game throughout the week with all of my updates. It was just less stressful for me to do it that way - and I updated it a lot lol.
• Yeah, with the ending, again, I just ran out of time. It's my first game, and I kept running into coding problems, so this is basically where I ended up by the end of the day on Friday and I was worn out from 10+hr days between coding and a full-time job all week. But I hope people take however long they like at the top to enjoy the view and the vibes and just rest after the somewhat hectic play from the upper levels!
• Yeah, no menus, just that Tab instruction screen. Everything is in GameMaker and in 3D, so I couldn't get the mouse to hover over and click things since you're looking at z-space instead of x,y space. Again, just totally new to this, and playtesters didn't like using arrow keys to navigate menus so I just gave that Tab side bar instead. 
• Yeah, definitely a simple-once-you-get-it super short game, but it was the best iteration (out of 5 different versions I tried to make) and I polished it as best I could. I had to spend so much time on tutorials to learn this much - it was a fantastic way to learn, but it's definitely not here to try to be a Steam game starter project or anything. I just wanted to try to make something, and I did, and this whole experience (especially feedback) has been great!

Thanks again so much for all of the awesome feedback (I hope I responded to everything!) and thanks so much for playing and commenting!