I'm happy to hear that the UI started making sense after a while. I was worried that in the absence of a tutorial it would be confusing so I added the tooltips as an intermediate step. Do you have any recommendations on what would be a good replacement for stars? Originally I had planned on doing a bar that shifted color tones, but I wasn't sure that it would be very accessible for color blind individuals.
Adding some buffer between the logs is a good idea. Under the Lamp (User), had some other feedback such separating out the inventory portion from the story elements that I may tweak as well. I'm glad to know that the color coding was helpful in keeping relevant information apparent. I tried to break it down between Informational (White), Story (Cyan), Warnings (Red), Buying (Magenta), and Selling (Green).
My hope is to continue development and do some major UI overhaul. As you know in these JAM games once you commit to a certain path it's hard to pivot design decisions even when you recognize they can be improved when you are running out of time. My hope is to have a hand crafted map with some narrative elements sprinkled around which will include new features/obstacles/towns/ports/etc. I was planning on adding "larger" towns in this iteration in the form of villages being next to each other, but they merge their resources together, but again, time was limited and the current system was functioning well enough to get the idea across.
Thanks again for the additional feedback!