(Why an "exhumation"? Well, a post-mortem has already been done: this is me digging up the corpse to re-examine it in light of new evidence.)

So, what went so wrong? Having read the reports given by the judges, here are my thoughts on the worst of the game's issues:

Gameplay
Combat was never intended to be the player's primary approach in this game. I intended it to be a survival horror experience; I wanted players to be scared of the toys, and to avoid them rather than engaging. (Indeed, the more toys one breaks, the worse the ending one gets if one reaches the end of the game!) I wanted to create a "weak" horror protagonist, not a monster-slayer.

With this in mind, I fear that I sent mixed messages--or simply the wrong message entirely--with regards to combat. I made combat slow and dangerous (overly so, I gather)--but nevertheless provided a weapon at the very start of the game.

Looking back, perhaps it would have been better to have left out the combat entirely and instead provided some other item for slot one.

Graphics/Theme
Toys are small (for the most part). Given this, it was perhaps a poor idea to choose a perspective that makes everything smaller still! The result seems to have been that the judges had a difficult time interpreting the enemies as the toys that they were intended to be: the headless doll--the first enemy encountered--seems to have been consistently misread as a headless baby or ghost, and at least one judge didn't recognise the wooden crocodile at all (and thus gave me a zero in the "theme" category, having not identified any toys in the game)!

(With regards to the doll, I had hoped that its lack of feet and inhuman movement would be enough to convey that it was intended as a doll, but in retrospect I wonder whether those traits might not have been a little subtle to be noticed at that scale in the middle of gameplay.)

This might have been solved by either choosing a different perspective (such as first-person, while would also have saved me creating a model for the protagonist), or by choosing toys that were more easily recognisable.

Overall and in conclusion
I think that one of my main failings in this competition is that I never released a prototype during the week: at least some of the game's issues--especially the problem of combat--might have been ironed out if I'd known about them during development.

In addition to that, I think that the project may have been just a little too large for the time-frame, given that I was working alone (albeit with music from an outside source)--something that I keep bumping into in short competitions like this. A number of the points that were criticised--in particular the very limited number of items, poor enemy placement, repetitive rooms, and lack of variety in "props" (the tables)--were the result of cutting corners (and features!) due to time constraints.

I still think that the concept was a good one: with a few more days and some prototype feedback, I think that I could have made a decent horror experience of it.

That said, I do now wonder whether I might not have been better off going with the other horror idea that I had--a first-person exploration game taking some gameplay cues from P.T. (specifically in having the player's gaze be a form of interaction). It would likely have called for a larger initial investment of time in modelling a small house (of a few rooms only), but the gameplay may have been simpler, and the first-person perspective might have made the toys more recognisable...