Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This game is excellent in every dimension. The visuals are stunning, gameplay was engaging and challenging enough to hold our attention without becoming too difficult to get through. I loved the take on our climate Science research, and I can see this type of game being very helpful for Alaskans to understand resource management and fire risk. I love the pixel clouds! I would have loved to see those have an effect somehow on the environment, maybe causing rain, snow, flooding, or lightning. Great work.
• This game is fun to play! The world building part is a good implementation of a pretty standard concept, and I love the treatment of temperature as another resource to manage. But wildfires seem far too easy to manage--with immediate and aggressive use of the shovel, you can cut firebreak during the fire rather than needing to do it ahead of time. It would be much more challenging if above 30C, the grass and trees start to turn crispy gray, and when fire starts it leaps 10 cells per timestep. Plus some seasonal or global climatic variations, sea level changes, etc could increase the late-game challenge. The repair tool seems underutilized; I only had one house need repair one time.
• This was a very nice systems game. I think replay value would be great for this, but obviously there are balance issues to fix--basically you can keep stockpiling money and it's easy to maintain the temperature--so the only way to "lose" is to ignore the game.
• I really enjoyed the design of your game! I can see that this was quite a task putting it all together. I especially enjoyed the interdependent elements, that made this game difficult to predict the outcome. Great work!
• The story is very simple and easy to understand. The aesthetics is retro 8-bit style, which goes with the simple structure of the game well. The graphics are designed well so they are easy to tell what they are, and little room for misinterpretation. It was very fun to play first, but it was hard to keep motivation up after it went into a pretty stable state. It'd be nice to have some motivation to keep going, like building structures which are visually very cool but destructive to the balance. Great use of the theme of the jam, and it's also very educational.