Heya! I'm only a half-entrant but given the nature of the questions I think my feedback is invited as well!
-What did you most like/dislike about the jam?
I admit, the whole theme thing made it feel a little limiting at times. Having to make a game about Harold already narrows down the possibilities a lot, but with the way the rules worded that the theme must be "prominent and obvious" it made me pretty stressed thinking about how to incorporate a lot of the sorta vague terms I was given. After later being clarified that the theme isn't that big of a deal, I felt a lot better about it, but I also understand that the point of the theme is to help prevent cheating by making preemptive projects, so I can't really recommend just getting rid of it, obviously.
- Where did you hear about the jam?
I'm in the RM Beta Testers server, so it's basically impossible NOT to hear about it. Frankly, at first I wasn't interested in joining the jam at all, so I was almost slightly annoyed by how prevalent it was. I definitely ended up warming up to it all in the end.
- What inspired you to join/submit?
I've been working with DJ for a little over two years now, and he's grown to be one of my closest friends, so seeing him learning RM by making extremely goofy games made me really eager to have him direct that humour into this jam, both because Human's aggressive marketing implied that more entrants would make him really happy, and also because a comedic jam like this sounds like the perfect training grounds to let my new student hone his abilities! Seeing him put everything he had into this jam made me really excited to help him out.
- If you didn't join/didn't submit, what was the barrier?
Probably comes as no surprise, but Axial is just a much bigger priority to me. I'm sure if I wanted to, I could have easily found the time to make a great entry to this jam on my own, but the time I would be spending working on a jam that I'm not 100% invested in would be time and skills taken away from my real passion project. It's possible by the next jam, my circumstances might be different and I can blow you guys away with my radical skillz ;D
- Future theme suggestions?
This is admittedly more Reid-y than Harold, but I think a Modern vs. Fantasy theme might be fun!
Or perhaps a Reid jam instead of Harold...? Hohohoho...
- Do you have any assets you'd like to make available to the community for next year?
I'd be happy to leave my 16x16 Harold sprite available, and I'm also going to double check with DJ to see if the Reid sprite in that art style could also be made publicly available. If there's any demand for more assets in this art style, I'd be happy to make some, but I also don't want to spend energy creating sprites that nobody wants to use.
- Any other thoughts or suggestions?
I think the rating categories were a little too vague at times. The "Harold" category, for example, was extremely hard for me to judge with. Was it meant to be the sheer quantity of Harold? How much I like how Harold was portrayed? The time limit thing was also supposed to affect the Harold rating which made it even more vague.
There was also a lack of any way for me to really rate how comedically funny the games in question were. Of course, I understand why: a good number of the games in the jam weren't comedies at all! But admittedly, it felt difficult to really rate how much I enjoyed something with the categories given (my top two favourites, HaroldHarold and Stuck In The Past, both felt they had to be rated lower than I would have liked due to them not being objectively "fun" or not being extremely Harold centric, for example). I'm not entirely certain how I would recommend fixing this, but the three categories given didn't quite feel satisfactory to me personally.
Overall though, I was pleasantly surprised by this jam! This was my first time ever participating even a little in a game jam, and it was definitely an interesting experience. I'm a little more open to the idea of joining them in the future now that I've seen that I don't necessarily have to make it a huge time commitment if I don't want to, especially since I had a lot of things that I chose not to do or suggest in order to ensure my partner had as much control over the project as possible; I think now that he can take care of himself, I'll be competing alone next time!