Thank you so much for giving us such a deep dive into your review of our game! I do agree with you about the game loop taking a bit too long and we initially did intend for it to be possible to simply emergency escape to the surface (we even had the art assets ready for such a thing) but like you said, 96 hours is only so much time. By the time we got to the last couple of hours there wasn't really much of a way to get the feature in which to us was one of our big disappointments in our entire experience as a whole. A lot of the team was fresh this year, as Daniel might've mentioned earlier and since all of us are students there were some issues with keeping the entire team at a similar operating capacity throughout the jam. Moving forward next year we will likely be in a better position to use our time better. As the one largely coordinating the team, I'll be sure to improve my understanding of good team management as well as getting to know the ins and outs of my team to make next year an even better success for us.
Everyone on the team is always striving to learn and grow. Our hope is to keep doing this game development thing, not just again and again but also better and better!
Thank you so much! We look forward to coming back!