Context

Favour is a browser-based asynchronous turn-based MMO where players accumulate turns over real time and spend them at will. Running out of time means your turn pool is depleted and you wait for it to refill (1 turn per 5 minutes, up to 250 capacity). It was originally submitted to GitHub Game Off 2025 (717 entries) and later entered into the Patch Notes 1.1 jam as a patch build.

GitHub Game Off 2025 — Results Summary

Rating Distribution: 

• 5-star 8%
• 4-star 5.8%
• 3-star 28.3%
• 2-star 28.3%
• 1-star 29.7%

Innovation ranked highest, which makes sense since players who got far enough recognized the concept. Audio only got positive comments in feedback, so the score was likely dragged down by overall clustering. The 1-star rate was a significant downward deviation compared to previous jam submissions.

The core problem was onboarding. Players who didn't reach combat couldn't accurately score theme interpretation, gameplay, or innovation, and most didn't reach combat. The backend work (account persistence, multiplayer state, deterministic combat) all functioned correctly, but UI clunkiness meant none of it was visible to the majority of raters. A video walkthrough was added mid-jam but didn't recover engagement meaningfully. 

Patch Notes 1.1 Jam — Results

Rating Distribution: 

• 5-star 0% 
• 4-star 18.8%
• 3-star 31.3%
• 2-star 33.3%
• 1-star 16.7%

Only 8 ratings. Due to time constraints, the jam version was submitted with known soft-locks and broken UI elements, with a hotfix available on a separate page (uploads were locked during voting). Sound design and presentation scoring highest is consistent with the UI revamp work done after Game Off.

What Changed Between Jams

The patch cycle addressed the most critical friction points: tutorial soft-locks, onboarding and UI revamp, auto-profile creation without auto-advancing to gameplay, virtual cursor and right-click support for touchscreen, Steam Deck and controller autodetect, live-update bugs in the top panel and siege logic, and audio mute behavior on slider change.

Takeaway

The UI needs some polish before we can continue validating the game concept. Age of Wonders 4, Endless Legend, and Civ VI provide great examples of accessible onboarding for complex turn-based games.