This was a pleasant surprise to me. Totally a germ. First of all, you did an amazing job. Second of all, the concept and game has a potential. I really enjoyed the concept but I had to play longer to understand it. It was easy to play and there are many things to improve and expand both content & UI wise. I think my only suggestion for improvement would be the UI (for a prototype its OK, but still could use some quality of life improvements). UI is the first thing I'm looking at and it has to be both appealing and intuitive. For example, allow zooming while you are in cave. Understanding the UI controls was a bit of a struggle to me. Once you add more assets, the game will elevate on to a next level.
Viewing post in Mutanica jam comments
Thanks for the feedback! For UI zoom I wrote it both in the description and in "the beginnings" section of the info tab. It's ctrl + mouse wheel scroll (ps. it was made that way so you could scroll text without scrolling the whole camera).
Now that I think about it, I think I should have added more information about how the upgrade UI works and not how it generally works.
I also can agree that the upgrade UI could have had some better visuals (it was planned to be a whole cells and not just last/first parts of it) yet the system was very hard for me to understand and make a plan to create such. It was more of an 'idea' and 'throwing stuff in and out until it works'. My main point there was to learn on how to at least make working prototype of that.
Because the UI was made as last thing I had not so much time to work on it (I have poor time management skill and underestimated the difficulty of such a thing).
But despite all that, I'd say the game is final, released. I did about 90% of what was planned for this game and I actually like the final product. I'll take notes based on how this one goes to make next game a little better. Thanks again for your kind review!
(PS. game concept was partially taken, simplified and modified from Spore, the start of it to be exact)