First off, congratulations on your first game jam! I really like the idea here and the very original spin on the theme. I would have liked another property or two available at the start as it took quite awhile before I finally landed on one. That said, I ended up playing a lot longer than I thought I would as there was just something relaxing and fun about the game. The sound effects you chose really fit well too. Great job!
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Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked it :)
Originally I did plan to have 3 properties that interacted in a rock, paper, scissors type of way, but it was a bit hard to make sense of it in a way that would translate to real world economics. Proximity ended up being the thing that made the most sense as a grocery store and a restaurant wouldn't be in direct competition with each other.
The third property also got cut in order to reach the deadline. I did try to give back some player agency in the form of the consumables. It's probably not that well communicated in the game, but the consumables you can buy on the vertical tiles allow you to reduce your diceroll down to 3 (so you have a 1 in 3 chance of landing on the property if you buy the consumable).
I know it can get particularly rough in the latest stage of the game, but I guess those are the dangers of relying on RNG.
That makes sense! Certainly the deadline always gets features cut that we wanted to include. I did like the option to buy stuff to change your dice roll. Ironically, I ended up using that a lot more AFTER I bought the properties as most of the items increased your roll. The lower rolls are great for trying to hit the properties in the first place so maybe more of those or having more of them at the start would help as well. The increasing your rolls was what I ended up using the most though so I could go around the board faster and build up more money. Honestly, I actually liked the late game the most whereas the early game trying to reach my first property was the roughest part. But still a fantastic job as it didn't stop me from playing and having fun.
There's a lot of ways to expand on it. Aside from tweaking the numbers, some kind of rudimentary inventory system that let players take items with them might be the quickest way of adding more depth to it. It's hard to account for how it's going to play before you actually start playtesting it though. I think it mainly comes down to having more strategic gameplay with ways of minimizing the randomness.