Thanks for checking the game out, and thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it.
Definitely agree with your concerns about the lack of tutorial/clarity around the objectives and how to deal with bugus. We wavered back and forth on whether we wanted to leave it up to the player to discover the bugu clicking mechanic on their own or whether we should explicitly teach it. We ended up putting a blurb about it on the itch page but not the game, which is a half measure. I think adding a "how to play" screen in the game would be a nice post-jam follow up. As for the lore-appropriate justification for why you're doing what the objective is asking of you, I leave that to my co-creator since she is the brilliant mind behind gubus.
Thanks for the suggestion re: the performance issue on big selections. Each time a gubu is selected, I start a tween to beam them up and turn on their individual particle systems. In the smaller levels that's ok, but in the larger ones, the game can really slow down. I'm actually not sure if it's all the tweens, particle systems, or the combination of everything that's really killing the performance. I'll be doing some profiling to figure it out. I like your idea of batching the processing into groups, but I will admit that I'm no expert in optimizing godot games, so I'm not sure the best way to handle this sort of thing.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comment!