…plus few unexpected issues that wasted too much time to solve (a problem I could fix in 1 minute took me 6h of research - to speak about my worst time wasting situation).

This happens to everyone, and I always try to spin it as a learning situation or an opportunity to investigate and improve my problem solving skills myself. Of course, it’s always hard to see it positively when you are on a deadline and know time spent there is time no longer available to spend making other things better.

…also requires Google Captcha…

I also hate Google Captcha. The worst offender I’ve seen is a government website I must use to e.g. pay my taxes. It feels like I’m working for Google training their AI for free, which is infuriating.

But I delete it also, because I will never join an itch game jam again. The malus system is super unfair.

I also thought the rating system was ill-conceived. The last jam I did on Itch did not have everyone else rate each other. Instead, there were four or so appointed judges who did not make games themselves. Knowing this, I would ask you reconsider writing off Itch jams because not all jams work the same as this one.

I think judges make much more sense because community voting causes a perverse incentive to rate games lower in order to give your own game a better chance. I did not do that–I tried to honestly rate the games. I rated them somewhat relative to each other, e.g. if I believed game X did better than game Y on audio, I would make sure game X had one more star than game Y. I also factored in “perceived effort”, i.e., does this game seem like the developer spent a lot of time on it vs. not much time.

At the end of my rating all the other games, I would adjust the total stars one way or another in order to come out with my perceived deserved absolute rating; if I wanted game X to be overall higher than game Y but they were tied on stars, I would ding a star on game Y to make it happen. I did all this trying my best to NOT consider my own game in the rankings.

I don’t know if you’ll see this because you might have deleted your account already, I don’t know. For the record, I was hoping your game would end up in the top three. I think it has potential and am excited to see you continue improving it.