Here comes a really long comment. (It's a good thing because I feel passionate)
I really enjoyed this one and was really surprised how much you managed to get done. Even though I have no idea how much of AI wrote the code, things were pretty polished despite a 4 day time limit. I even stopped at the intro screen because I was surprised by how the menu looked. I like to play games blind without reading any instructions until I'm truly stuck and I'm surprised how much of the gameplay I understood intuitively. Rumors and secret was the only thing I didn't quite understand until night 2. I didn't understand what the extra ingredients did so I got them late. A quick reading of the description would have cleareed all confusion though. I got the ending where the school teacher came back so 1/3 people returned. The game was fairly long for a jam but I enjoyed it. I might give the game another go to see if I can figure it all out now that I understand the game.
Possible improvements:
- Add a full screen or smaller screen option? The game viewport was taller than my laptop screen so I had to scroll up and down. Thankfully important game elements were super close to the top so I was mostly fine. The biggest issue was the shop area where the procede button is hidden on the top right unless I scrolled
- Add better controls. The day order shortcut felt really janky to me. I'd say keep 1, 2, 3, 4 as is but swap 5, 6, 7, 8 with q, w, e, r just so the shortcut for the ingredients match keyboard layout somewhat. Going from 1 to 8 felt awkward. I'm not sure if the change would make it feel better.
- More upgrades or scale money better? Maybe it's an accessibility thing but I maxed out everything super quickly and then money sort of served no purpose.
What I liked
- The subtle tutorial was nice. The beginning was really hectic because the player is sort of just thrown in but I noticed you gave extra time to adjust. The ingredient portion for rumors and secrets highlighted during the first day helped a lot with getting me to understand the goal.
- Once again. The UI was really nice. I don't do a lot of UI so I guess I'm easily impressed.
- I encountered no bugs.
- You mixed 2 gameplay idea fairly well. The vibe was immaculate.
Overall very nicely done.