really cool concept, and i commend you on trying such an ambitious one for a jam! i ended up getting a little lost towards the end, when it wouldnt let me build and more structures and my hydrogen was depleting.
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Thanks for the comments!
Yeah there was a problem we realized late in development that we called a 'soft-lock'. Because the game is flow dependent it's very easy to end up in a situation where you can't advance. That really comes down to really precise tuning, which for a game like this would honestly take like weeks to sort out because everything is time dependent and related to each other.
In a proper game ( not a jam ) you should do balance analysis before hand, sort of mathematically describing the relationships, like a game model in a spread sheet that lets you play with relative strengths and weaknesses of all the buildings.
We also capped the game at 24 buildings ( and there was a bug that was capping it at 22, we found after release ) , again because of time limits we didn't want to hafta deal with users placing buildings cuz getting the UI for that right would have taken the UI dev a day or two once you factor in polish and good feedback.
Our objective was to trail the concept with bare minimum of scaffolding and see if it worked at all. We think it did, but a future iteration, if we take this farther, will likely be much more involved.