In such a short timeframe, balancing was mostly done via intuition. Considering that, I'm relevantly happy with how the final result ended up turning out in terms of my goals for how strategically deep I wanted the final result to be.
I was aware that the resources could go negative. This was deliberately left in (it would have been a trivial change, naturally). Whether that was correct from a balance perspective is a bold question. Adds a relevant bit more challenge, which I intuitively liked, so I kept it in. Thematically, you could consider some events in some situations (partially from lack of preparation) so detrimental that recovering from them may in fact be impossible and a restart may be required
The music is from a copyright free source (I do personally do some piano compositions, but in such a short timeframe, making something specifically for this jam game was non-viable). The Sound effects were created by me with a sound effect generator application.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Yea I'd be very happy myself with this!
That makes sense on negative resources, I do like the idea of detrimental events, and 'restart threats'. Maybe something like casting cards could be an interesting way for the player to salvage/prepare for them, in addition to beneficial events. Or event rarity by tiles (I found myself planning around tiles). It is an interesting balancing problem, and I admire the game's achievement on that given the complexity.
I'd love to play more of your games in the future (hope to hear some piano too)!
Out of my other games published on itch, "[Kanin]" and "Prayers and Precipitations" both feature a bit of my music (not specifically written for those games, necessarily, but fitting selections from what I've done). Both ~4 week jam games. "[Kanin]" is the odd game out, in terms of genre, compared to the other 4 games I presently have on Itch, mainly because for that Jam I wanted to see what I could do more so in terms of art/animation assets than actual mechanics.