Thank you so much for testing it out and giving such a detailed response, it really means a lot to me <3
I'll have to check out the Half Earth game, it looks really interesting, and I didn't know about it :O
I definitely want to continue on this project and will do so, although at a less stressful and slower pace. It will most likely be a few months before it's in a feature-complete state, but it will get updates after the jam, so stay tuned :)
I'm completely inexperienced in both art and music, so I am relying on (modified) free assets for art, and free assets for music. (Sound effects, I was able to get enough know-how under my belt to get some decent beeps and bloops by now). The music is an awesome music pack by Retro Indie Josh, check it out here: https://retroindiejosh.itch.io/music-pack-13 .I was lucky that there was a free music pack with old DOS-Adlib style music that I could use fittingly like this.
I'm also happy the art style is coherent enough to land :)
And yeah, the end goal is to make it a mix of a visual-novel like experience, and a political simulation, with ultimately aiming to be an "anti-economic" sim. You can read a bit more about the early development was in my devlog here. Basically, it was inspired by old economy sims that were hugely popular in Germany (and some parts of Europe), made by German developers that often combined dry statistics-heavy gameplay with a bit of life-sim stuff. Like Der Planer is one I remember from my childhood, where you manage a logistics firm and also your real life petit-bourgeois life and marriage, actually quite an ideological nightmare of a game :D. Also, one of the bigger ones was MadTV, where you manage a private TV station, setting the programmes to be watched, getting money from ads that require high enough viewer counts - all in an effort to make money to compete in a very basic dating sim with the CPU players to win the heart of a talking show host of a philosophy/culture show (which you impress by giving gifts and broadcasting intellectually challenging cultural broadcasts, which always tank viewer-count, but impress her :D ).
The whole idea of making a different status quo graspable beyond Utopian thought, with a more down-to earth scenario showing both everyday life and not shying away from challenges and possible contradictions is a bit of a pet obsession of mine. So, yeah, this is kind of a passion baby, it will definitely not be abandoned.