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Thanks for the answer and sharing your additional thoughts, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. :)

And I did not only mention the multiplayer thing just because it is hard, it is also because in a Jam there are not many people trying out games, and the ones trying them out want to play a lot of the entries, so having to wait for a lobby might scare people away.

Yeah, that's a useful observation.

One of my motivations for working on the project is to uncover some of the barriers that indies/jammers might face during development/release & serve as disincentives in terms of experimenting with making multiplayer games (even when using no-price services).

Based on my own experience so far, some I've identified are:

• Moderation of User Generated Content (even as simple as player names)
• Testing of multiplayer functionality (e.g. via bots)
• Gaining (sufficient quantity of) players

And your observation highlights a specific variant of the last item which is jam-specific, so it's useful to include that in my considerations.

Potential ways to improve the situation might be to provide, e.g., audio cues when another player joins so that it's possible to stay logged in idle but return when there's players; and/or, a more compelling single player experience that is then enhanced when another player joins.

The latter is an approach I was working toward previously in a 7 Day Roguelike entry which unfortunately didn't get as far as this entry. Another option is to intentionally provide more of an idle game experience, which was somewhat where I was aiming in the Desert Bus jam entry I was working on immediately prior to this jam, with the idea that people in that context would be okay "just sitting around". But, again, time!

Maybe if it was a multiplayer focused jam it would make more sense.

Yeah, that's a good thought.

but it is hard to evaluate as you really cannot experience the full thing.

Yeah, certainly in terms of someone who is entering jams with a rating focus (which I'm consciously not) that would be a reason to avoid a multiplayer scenario unless it was a game where more players enhanced the experience rather than being essential to the experience.

Thanks again, it's great to get another person's perspective on this topic.