Salvage Swarm shipped with a competitive layer built into every play session. A timer ticking in the HUD. Par times for each level. Stars on the win card, three for a clean run under par, fewer for using the spare bay or going slow. Crew paint jobs came with star milestones: 10, 20, 30. The whole thing tracked whether you were good at the game.
In the first review round, the progression scored 2 out of 5. Three loops fixed it: the difficulty curve had to actually bite before the measurement layer had anything to push against. By the end, the win rate on the final level was 0.25 for a random player tapping without reading the board, and it never rose from one level to the next. The star system sat on top of that, intact and working.
Then I pulled it out.
Not because reviewers flagged it. Not because it scored low. Because when I looked at what the game actually was, it didn’t fit. Salvage Swarm is a spatial puzzle. You’re reading a stack of blocks, picking the order to dock crates, and trying not to jam your bays. The tension is the decision, not the clock. A timer running in the corner turns every order into a race against an arbitrary number I’d picked for a level I’d generated. That’s not the game.
The v2 reset replaced stars with parts. You earn parts for completing orders, with a bonus for a clean solve (no spare bay, no power-ups, undo is free). Paint jobs go by pictures salvaged. There’s a 100-order campaign in 10 chapters and a daily pool of 49 separate pictures, all pixelated Twemoji icons hand-picked and placed in scenes. The x5 final sweep and the x2 speed button stayed. Everything that measured your reaction time left.
The review process did its job. Three loops rebuilt a difficulty curve that started flat. Four rounds moved fourteen of fifteen portions to 4 or 5. But it couldn’t catch whether the premise was right, because reviewers were scoring the system as designed, not questioning why it existed.
I had to do that part myself.
The timer was there because I’d seen it in other puzzle games and it seemed like the right move. Stars were there because progression loops are supposed to keep players coming back. Both are real mechanics. Neither one was answering the question: what does it feel like to play this game?
Building something and then having to ask that question is uncomfortable. The answer sometimes is that a thing you spent real time on has to go. The parts system went in without ceremony. The game shipped.