Hey, thanks for the kind comment and for the feedback! Did you manage to unlock and build the wood farms? Those will give you constant generation of wood, although I heard that since it is a random card-unlockable, I wonder if it's too punishing if you don't get it. I thought I had been quite generous with the amount of wood given by cards but I wonder if I am mistaken?
Haha the storm is meant to be brutal but I am getting mixed comments. Some find it way too easy and build so far ahead of the storm, while others think it's too difficult! I'm going to have a hell of a time balancing this game XD. For now my solution is sorta to provide roguelike permanent upgrades to help each subsequent run. But I do wonder if there are better ways to improve it, like dynamic difficulty, or even the ability to summon the storm at your own pacing.
As for my development process, I'll do a more detailed writeup sometime but you can look at my ideation process here and devlogs if you want to which mention some shortcuts and tricks I used to optimize my effort and re-direct time on areas I wanted to improve on. For this jam, my goal is to focus more on polish and game design, so I had help from external assets. It's also the reason why my iteration style is to upload a playable v0.1 as early as possible. I used that to get initial feedback and then proceeded to iterate on the remaining days to really polish it till v0.5. So while I uploaded the first version after 4 days, I continued to update and iterate on the game every day until the last day. I was also surprisingly invested in the idea so I worked extremely hard on it. It helped that this jam is longer than others. I think I seriously maximized the full week lol. Probably the hardest jam I worked on and I think the results surprised even myself.
Also wanted to add that I'm perhaps on the slightly more experienced side so it's perhaps not fair to compare. I've worked in gamedev but also have animation and extensive 3D background so not only can I put together stuff really quickly, I'm very comfortable working with 3D, lighting, post processing and FX to make a scene pop, making cinematics with Cinemachine and Timeline rapidly, etc, so I have an advantage there. I've also been told that I excel in rapid prototyping, a skillset which seems to come in really handy in scenarios like game jams.
Lastly, I was lucky to have a very clear vision of my direction which I think helped me plan my time a lot better. Thus, my bottleneck is less of programming and art, but more of game design. I focused on what I felt were high impact features. There were a lot more stuff I wanted but I had to cut them, but I will be gradually adding them into the game after the jam rating period is over, with the first update to put out later today!
Oops sorry I typed so much. I think I get super passionate discussing games and processes and I just went a little ham there X_X