Reactions to Stack-O-Lantern on Kongregate

The good news:  I got over 500 plays in less than three days and I was on the front page of Kongregate for a small period of time.

The bad news:  I don't think anybody "got" the game - in fact, the few people that rated it, hated it. Do I understand why?  Not really, but I am biased.  Here are my thoughts as to why it did not succeed on Kongregate...

1. It demanded that you think about what you are doing.  A lot of games out there are mindless point-and-click games that reward you heavily for not doing much.  Yes, I'll admit, this game is a little tricky, but after playing it a couple of times, you should be able to get it.  There seems to be an alarming trend these days of people "wanting all and giving nothing" - this mook behavior seems to bleed into the Flash game arena and it's a little disappointing.
2. They just didn't get the concept.  One person said that they absolutely didn't understand the concept of the game - I didn't think it was that in-depth.  You are taking characters out of a stack and placing them on a floating icon.  The instructions on the Kongregate page state how to play it; I even took the time to create a little how-to page inside of the game. I am very aware that the game is not your ordinary puzzle game, but the concept of dealing with a stack of things is very basic and understandable to me. Can anyone say Jenga?
3. They thought that the physics were off.  I can promise you that the physics aren't off - the Box2D engine is very good and I used a lot of settings to make it behave the way I thought it should.  When you stack a lot of objects in real life, the stack tends to become more unstable the higher it gets - the game behaves this way as well.  Also, when you try to pull a box that is halfway down the stack, the other boxes are going to be affected; whether they fall or get knocked, they are going to move.  I went back and tweaked some settings to see if it was me being biased about the game or if the user's were too sensitive - the more I tweaked the settings the less realistic it seemed to me, and I decided to leave it alone.  So, I really don't understand this complaint, though everyone complained about it - I could go into the math behind it and try and justify my opinion, but what's the point? They wouldn't get it anyways.
4. They hated the scoring model and believed it was buggy.  Again, this is something that baffled me.  One person commented saying that because his score was low the game was buggy.  I clearly stated in the instructions that dropping characters on the ground will hurt your score.  If you drop characters, that is something that can't be rewarded; and to make it more challenging to get some of the achievements, I thought that you should take great care not to drop anything.  I wanted an extra challenge and the players did not respond well to it, oh well. But without the challenge of losing points for dropping characters the game is way too simple. It's kinda like playing bowling with the gutter bumpers. It's kinda fun but gets boring real fast. Within the first few hours I had a few people blowing up the high scores ranks. So I know that my scoring model was effective and it was possible to do well.

I got a lot of "fail" comments but that is somewhat expected when you put content on the web. Sometimes there are people out there that just want to put everyone and everything down. I looked at these people's comment histories and it basically was the same comment for every other game. The funny thing about people like that is that they are incapable of doing anything themselves, and that to me, makes their opinion invalid.  I welcome constructive or valid criticism and I wish that I had received more of that instead of the hateful comments.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with my little game. My wife and I put a lot of thought into the character and level design, and to be honest, I thought it was a cute game that would at least allow people to have a good time for 5 minutes out of their day.  Is it a perfect game?  Of course not, and I will be the first to admit to that.  But it taught me a lot and it has just motivated me even more to make games. I have so many ideas for other games that I don't know what to start on next. Whatever it is, I know I will have fun with it. And I hope that some people can get enjoyment out of it.