Enjoyed this one a lot. I think you might be closer to release than you think, at least depending on the scope you have for that visual polish, but I don't know your project as well as you do. My notes from my play session are:
- The animal display while placing an animal tile seems to be bugged - it displayed right for the first tile, and then for every subsequent tile it displayed the wrong animal (which updated to be correct once I placed the tile). Additionally, the end screen seems to have a bug as well (it just displays the total points as 888888888)
- I'm sure you plan on communicating this, but I wish I knew what the animals did! Mostly I use them as a free 50 points every few turns, but they clearly do more than that
- The game is very hard. On my play I got to a score of 2979/4700, over a thousand points away from even the third goal. If I were to blame anything (other than my skill) I'd blame all of the tiles which serve to cap off connecting sections (any tile which doesn't have 2 of the same area adjacent), sometimes it feels like there are a few too many of those. But then again, maybe I'm just salty lol
- Gimme the calming music! I don't care if it's just royalty-free classical music you downloaded off of the internet, give it to me!
For the positives:
- The change to allow rotating the pieces I really enjoyed, it added a lot to the strategic thinking
- The artwork looks nice, I like all of the 3D trees and cacti, and the animals are cartoony but very easily readable, I like them
- I enjoy the depth on the ocean block (the thing the play area sits on), I can't pin down why but it looks a lot nicer than I imagine just a thin sheet would