Good tip/feedback to add it to the front page indeed!! Was our first special edition so we have to learn along the way also how to make it a smoother experience for the participants. And also with this special mechanic it was for us finding out how to manage it. We thought the forum is well read and it was also on Discord but not everyone joins there of course. We will do that better next time!
Indeed ZERO UI can be different for a lot of people. Some find audio cues also UI and some not and some think diegetic UI is ok and others not. There is not a definite definition. Not even the post in the forum is for everyone the definition of zero ui. So the discussion would be stil there and that is not a bad thing.
I am glad it sparked discussion and you liked that. And please discuss it also further with the other participants here or on Discord about what is UI and what we think UI is.
Creating games without any UI is also not normally what any game will do, but that is why we thought it would be a nice challenge to see how we can guide a player through a game without UI.
Hope you still enjoyed the jam and even with a bit of UI and great scores in the other categories you can still get a good rank also. I do not think there will be perfect ZERO UI games at all. You will have good ones that did go far or some that did a bit of UI and some that just did a lot of UI and just want to make fun game for the theme.
thank you so much for the thoughtful reply! and yes, I still really enjoyed participating in this jam; in fact, it was one of the best experiences I've had here on itch.io! next time i will definitely try to get more involved in the community discussions here - and on discord. i've always had a tendency to make games in isolation, but I think it would be far more rewarding to give and accept feedback, encouragement and collaboration from other developers.