Thanks for playing and for your interest :)
Giving more context around the Taiping Rebellion is definitly something we should have done, we were a bit too focus on telling Qiu's story and forgot about this important part. I guess that at least a simple text panel in the main menu would have helped ^^'
As we were envisonning an adventure game where the player would followed Qiu through the beginning of her involvement to the end of her life, we wanted to give some variation in the gameplay to not bore the player with too much text. We also wanted to give historical context information while keeping the player immerse in the experience and that's how we ended up adding the exploration (point and click) sections. We were planning a very simple battle system for people that prefer some action in games too.
The main goal was always to give as much story as possible, so we did integrate it in priority and delay the battle integration after. We could have added more, but I had some technical issue with WebGL at the end (not my best idea to make a game jam with a tech stream :x). Looking at the end result, there is definitly an unbalanced, but well, that how game jams goes sometimes. I'm just glad to have been able to put at least a bit of everyone's work into the final product :D
Dialogues wise, steredice took inspiration from the source she could find, but there isn't much archives from this time unfortunately. I don't know how much familiar you are with the original revolt, but we hope the provided interpretation was appealing enough to keep you engage until the end :)