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(+1)

This is far better entry than you would have had me believe from your comment to me. Genuinely very feature rich, and while I understand you are perturbed by having to cut content; this has alot going for it.

The environments are stunning. Many will put that simply down to Unreal, but the scenes are dressed well and a considerable amount of thought has been put into which assets to use and where to place them, which is a skill in of itself. The menu, UI and other 2D elements are solid and warmly recieved, there's a great deal of QoL baked in which is really nice. The collectibles and flavour text are all nice little touches that really build on the exploratory portion of the game.

You've had some really outstanding feedback from the other commenters, so I won't add to things that you already know. However there might be a few things I might be able add regarding my experience as a beginner. 

It certainly seems that filesize is directly correlated to the number of plays, and this is a beast. I'm not sure what resolution textures you're using, however I would assume due to the filesize that they are on the larger end. I have been porting my game to 3D and in my own learning post jam, I have realised that you can be really efficient in dungeon crawlers, as many meshes are only ever seen from one side within the grid. I've been manually unwrapping the UVs and shrinking all but the visible face to 1 pixel. You can essentially squeeze 4k of resolution into a 1k texture at around 1mb compressed and it's doing wonders for my filesize.

My firewall also popped on running the game, while I understand it's probably just Epic doing some data collection, it's not ideal considering I couldn't run this through the itch client.

All in all I think this is an great entry and I think you need to give yourselves more credit for what you've achieved. Especially considering your working commitments alongside the jam, well done. I hope you will considering entering again next year, because I think you could produce something really special with some tooling ahead of time and after applying everything you've learned. 

Thank you.

(+1)

Thank you for the extremely kind feedback!

Also, thanks for the tip with texturing!

I am sure Syvice will be excited to hear that you appreciated the environments, he is educated and experienced as a professional 3D/Environment artist, so that was all his doing. :)

I am not sure about the firewall because I could have sworn that I turned all the analytics stuff off. You never know with corpo engines these days, though. There is probably still something that runs in spite of my toggling everything off.

We had originally thought about turning everything in the project into a billboard to save on file size. Ultimately, we got too scared of that approach, because none of us had ever built a game that way and we didn't want to deal with too many unknown-unknowns.

I think we will plan to participate next year, it will be my first ever repeat game jam! Normally I look for different jams with varying constraints so that I can learn more from each experience. If the three of us on this team continue to work together though, I think doing DCJam again next year would be a good benchmark for our progress!

Thanks again for the thoughtful and kind feedback, looking forward to playing the refined version of your game!