Wow, thank you so much for trying out the game and taking the time to write this lengthy feedback!
I wanted to take the time to touch on some of the points you brought up, hopefully ease your mind a bit.
- The game itself was always supposed to be a Visual Novel style game. We really struggled to find something to do with the theme and we ended up crafting something around the twist at the end (don't want to spoil it, hopefully you made it to the end to understand how our game links to the theme).
- We really wanted to focus on having an engaging story and reveal the twist. It's really hard to write a mystery story that is humoristic and coherent. As you pointed out, the dialog choices might seem "meaningless" but considering it's a VN game, it goes without saying that these choices add interactivity to the dialogs. The dialog scenes are not cutscenes but the actual game. Given more time, we could have made choices be more meaningful and lead to different story branches but that makes it even more complex to write.
- We understand that a Visual Novel game is pretty niche and might be boring for a lot of people. This is why we wanted to implement an open world sandbox where you could drive around and investigate different locations in any order. We also wanted to add more to the sandbox, a car chase for example. All of these plans had to be scrapped due to time. We decided to leave the driving in, even in its linear state, because it gave the players some break from all the reading/dialog.
- It's funny and eye opening, reading all the comments, how a lot of people love the driving, some hate it and some find it's fun as a break in the story.
- For the graphics, we heavily relied on asset packs we had licences for. If we didn't have these assets, we would never have been able to deliver a game of that scope. We also used tools to help us, like INK for the dialog system (freely available) . In the end, making a game is about assembling pieces together to create something. You don't have write everything from scratch, you mostly never do in any industry. Even AAA companies buy assets if it saves time.
- Believe it or not, this was our very first game jam but most of us have a lots of experience making art/music/code. Being a team of 4, we could share the workload, one full time writer, one music composer, one graphics lead and one gameplay lead. We put tons of time working on this, a lot more than we should probably have but we were all having fun and wanted to create something great.
With all that said, hopefully you can see that you should not feel insecure. And for the record, I feel insecure too sometimes. I tried around 70 games and a lot of them are gems, much better than our game, IMO. The way you see game jams isn't wrong. I also think it's good to look for innovations. For this first jam, we tried something and once committed, we went all in trying to craft the best game we could.
You have to see that just the fact you released a game is already a win (I'll try yours soon). You do the best you can with what you have and try to have fun doing it.
We honestly don't know where this will lead. The goal was not to make a demo or go commercial. The positive feedback we received does makes us consider making the next chapter and fixing/improving all the aspects you brought up. We'll see!
Cheers!