The game is definitely heavy on dice and that's something we talked about when we were building the mechanics but decided we liked the idea enough to roll with it even if it lost a bit of accessibility. One of the reasons we chose 6 as the max dice cap is so that the game could play reasonably smoothly with only 3 sets of dice as you'd never have to roll more than twice, which, while not ideal, shouldn't hurt pacing too much.
As for the numbers that's something we had to watch carefully. This was a pretty big project to tackle in 48 hours, plus we all had our actual jobs cutting in to some of our time so we didn't really have time for a playtest. I sat down and calculated the odds of success for every potential roll and charted everything out and we decided that we were happy with how it looked and went forward with it.
As far as inspirations are concerned I'm not sure there's any single thing to point to really. We're all fans of narrative systems like Powered by the Appocolypse but our mechanics ended up being a combination of a bunch of different systems we brainstormed. Specifically two of the systems we talked about were a 6 skill system where each skill was assigned a die and your goal was to roll under a set number, as well as a d6 system where you called a number and the more that number came up the more successful you'd be. This ended up kind of being a love child between these two systems with some added twists coming later on down the line.