I definitely bit off more than I could chew, and severely underestimated the amount of writing I would require. I originally estimated around 5k words and ended up with almost 10k. It probably would have been better if I avoided branching outside of the endings for the jam, so that I would have had time to actually make the story work.
> Any Disco Elysium inspiration probably went over my head
In terms of explicit references, the skills are based directly on DE skills, and there are some explicit references in the text that are basically all jokes and not important to understanding the story.
For inspiration, the overall writing style and content are heavily inspired from DE. The religion system was also meant to be like the politics system in DE, where depending on the choices you make you could "be" a Communard (communist), Fascist, Moralist (centrist), or Ultraliberal (libertarian). Unfortunately I couldn't fully integrate the religion system into the game in time for the jam. I originally planned to have it heavily affect the choices you could make in the dialogue with Utsuho, as well as having effects in dialogue and interactions throughout the rest of the story.