Wow, trying to balance this thing is already turning into a headache...
I couldn't get the 'child' stuff to balance - the idea was that whenever 2 Humans were touching, they would add a Child icon - which takes 3 spins to become a Human.
After only a couple of spins, there would be so many Child icons in the collection that they pretty much drowned out any other icons from showing up.
I tried some things ,but nothing worked so I just took that interaction out - planning to just let the player spend resources to add Child icons later on.
Now, I'm trying to balance the animals. First, I just had few 'predators' that would wound Humans (2 wounds = death) and have a small chance to multiply.
After a handful of spins, all the Humans would be dead and there would be tons and tons of wolves - even though I had their 'multiply chance' at only 10%/spin
So I added some Prey animals (deer, hare) and now I have the game spawn 1 animal at random each spin (with some weights to favor prey)
Then I also added 2 spears to the starting collection - when a spear is touching a human, it kills all animals it's touching that round. Each animal creates some number of Meat icons when killed based on which animal from 1-8.
Humans touching Meat on subsequent spins will destroy the icon and generate Food currency...
Now, spin ~5 times and there is SO MUCH MEAT - the humans are creating so much by killing animals that they can't eat it all!!
Maybe I should have predators kill prey animals and/or eat meat that is left lying around... but I was not expecting to have things so hard to control!
Well, back to the grindstone... 🍖