This is probably my most favorite game jam game I have worked on. I am super happy with the final product of Eco Terrorist. I'd like to share you all what I learned.
So my selling point for my game to fit the theme "Failure is Progress" was to make a game where you have to fail on purpose to get the games true ending . What you had to do was beat the game WITHOUT collecting a single coin.
The thing is though, I never told them that they had to do that. Instead, I put in a subtle hint to give them an idea to do that. And it worked! People actually tried to beat the game without collecting a single coin!
The problem though was that hardly anybody accomplished that, because it was too hard! :( I don't think it was because you needed a lot of skill, I think it was because not a lot of people figured out how to solve some of the puzzles. They were so difficult I bet a lot of them thought the rooms were impossible.
I can agree that the puzzles can be extremely difficult without prior video game knowledge. Maybe that wasn't a good idea for the game jam considering that people have short attention spans during these things since they are trying to play as many games as possible.
I thought that players would be smart enough to figure out some of the puzzles, but a lot of people struggled. Some people probably didn't think they could go above the stage or use I-frames to get past a certain room, but you can. Maybe I could have made easier rooms with easier puzzles to explain the mechanics. I didn't go through with it because I didn't want to insult the players intelligence or underestimate them. I wanted them to feel rewarded for figuring things out on their own. That was probably a mistake.
Also I didn't make it clear that there WAS NO ending for collecting all the coins. I probably should have made that clear somehow or made it a feature, but I ran out of time. I probably overwhelmed the player with the amount of variety.
So, all I can say is, if your going to respect the players intelligence, trust that they can figure things out on their own, but that doesn't mean by not showing them what they can do. If I did, I probably would have gotten a better Wowie rating, (still, #147 place isn't bad) if only they got the secret ending.
However, I am glad some people found the secret ending, and I bet they thought it was worth it.