Nice idler game!
To me the cycle of night and day and the computer intermissions didn’t do much, I just wanted to get back to the game even though the writing wasn’t bad. I think a good way to have it would be to place the sleeping guy on the side somewhere on the main screen (like the thermometer) and make the thoughts come up occasionally above while you play, this way it offers a backdrop of context without taking me out of actually playing the game.
It would be nice to have the upgrade selection be around the cell you are upgrading, or at least the center of the sceen so you don’t have to travel back and forth from upper cells with the cursor for each upgrade.
Selecting something that you haven’t got the energy for shouldn’t close the upgrade choice, this paired with the above creates a bit more friction than ideal.
Might be better if antibodies didn’t subtract from the energy you have already produced. Currently it makes it so that you can be selecting an upgrade you have enough energy for but before clicking you lose some thanks to antibodies and you can start over with the entire process. I think it’s enough if antibodies only reduce health and the food you have collected to not interrupt the flow this way.
It wasn’t clear to me whether I could stack multiple of the same thing on the same cell and have a meaningful effect. I think in general, just having one “role” per cell might be enough, so it’s either a chef, mouth etc, I think some of these upgrades might be better as attachables instead for example there could be a faster turret kind or a sucker that is stronger etc, then roles would just do stuff like “produces extra resource upon eating for each sucker attached”.
I think the gray background hurts the otherwise cute art style a bit, we are inside a body after all :)
At the start I think the game might as well pick a cell on the side for you, there isn’t much point in starting from the middle as it is way to slow to get going that way I think, but as a new player you don’t know this.
Either way, thanks for this game, I had fun!