Thanks so much for your detailed feedback! We spent the last day or so testing and balancing, and its hard to get right! You're right about the payment; so you get paid hourly during work hours (I think it's set to 9-5) minus time that you spend cleaning up or petting the foxes, which is reflected in the "next pay". We should have made this a lot clearer.
I'm glad you felt some attachment to your foxes :D We made it so that each fox has a hidden happiness, hunger, and health meter, and when you satisfy all three they can mature (only mature once per day though). Then when they are all mature and meet all three conditions, you win. It was actually harder than we expected to get this across to the player. Initially we thought about giving each fox bars, then we experimented with thought bubbles which resulted in too much clutter and didn't look good, so we decided to try to show it all via the animations, e.g. crying when sad, drooling when hungry, ill when sick.. but I absolutely agree this needed a lot more work. The code is really really spaghetti unfortunately so providing feedback via the animations might not be working 100% correctly so you may have not noticed that your fox was sick 😳
We kept in petting the foxes overnight because the consensus was it was funny, but I guess it doesn't make too much sense :D