itch.io

A very good point, and one we considered! Like many jam entries, we felt the siren call of making the game as difficult as the systems would reasonably allow, but we ultimately opted to give a bunch of extra padding for accessibility and to allow a non-stressful experience for the player.

Originally, instead of money, we had a turn limit that was fine tuned with each recipe. However, balancing was difficult, as a series of unlucky draws could make success trivial on one test, and nearly impossible on another test of the same round with the same turn limit. Blackjack has the same problem, but makes up for it by being composed of numerous very quick rounds that deal with smaller numbers. By switching to a money system, we made it more thematically intuitive to do stuff like give refunds, and have the savings from a lucky round carry over as a parachute for an unlucky round. And for a jam game, we made do with that.

Personally, I think the final form of this as a released game would look like an endless roguelike where the demands of a round gradually overtake the rewards, kind of like Balatro. We actually had it set up to procedurally generate rounds, but we opted for a more defined experience for the jam. If someone's going to only play our game for a few minutes, we want them to get the idea, get rewarded for using the systems we created, and leave with a positive impression.

But you're right that things like appraisal cost need to be fine tuned. We went back and forth on it. If it's cheap, there's no real reason not to do it every time. But if it's expensive, at a certain point it becomes more worth it to spend that money mining more for smaller ores, and then there's no point to there even being an appraisal tool! Interesting problems that we didn't get to solve because we were adding particles. That's jams!