Haha glad you liked! The snails were one of the first doohickeys made, and also ended up much more versatile than other doohickeys with a win condition (birdwatching is okay but you can always do it at the end, same with rain plants, discs are my personal favorite but they're also really hard and had to be introduced later bc of that.). Mice are useful and cool but on top of them not being made until a good few days in, they're inherently harder than snails because they have their own loss condition.
We had a bunch of extra rooms made that were actually scrapped partially for fatigue/keeping things concise reasons (and also partially because some of them were Evil) but it was also important we gave each doohickey some amount of love, even if some (sorry dizzy monster </3 ) got the short end of the stick. Looking at it from the perspective of people who properly understand the game and what makes it fun now, I think we mostly agree that certain doohickeys don't do much for the game and could've been scrapped to keep things concise, but that's the fun thing about making games on a time limit lol, there's only really time to think about this stuff after the deadline.
Thanks so much for the thoughts, it's interesting to look back on how translucent a development process can be when it needs to be done quickly.