Strengths:
- I can see that you've had some productive brainstorming, and your chosen idea sounds interesting.
- Your early concept art is promising, already suggesting a confident visual style that'll be able to reach a high level of polish within the jam's timeframe.
- Resource management and a timer sound like good elements to add pressure in a way that fits the theme of the game, and also introduce a level of replayability.
- I like your bullet points for "thought provocation"; I think you could weave an interesting storyline through these in both the narrative and in how the player uses the mechanics. As you say, wildfires are themselves a natural part of the ecosystems life-cycle, creating areas of new growth that are vital to lots of animals, plant, and fungal species (interestingly, in previous decades it was an issue that rangers actually worked too hard to prevent forest fires in order to protect the assets of silviculture plantations, to the detriment of this cycle—could be worth emphasising that a no-fire solution would still be artificial and anthropocentric). The hugely increasing number and scale of fires, however, is catastrophic and directly connected to human activity, so fits the theme. Your level of research seems adequate to pull it off, and any granularity you can add will add character (such as how I can see you've focused in on the Black-backed woodpecker; that level of detail in your setting is great).
Things to think about:
- The scale of this project seems quite large, and could quickly become too much to finish within the scope of the jam if there's any creep. Your team is quite big, so it's certainly not impossible, but you'll have to be well organised and managed. I think you really need to decide on your minimum viable product (mvp) you want to have ready for prototpying, including which mechanics it'd be most important to have in place ready for this. Last year, a common issue was not finishing some/all of the key mechanics for this stage, which causes extra development stress next stage and means you lose a vital chance at playtesting and feedback that'd help the final product.
- Make sure the mechanics of your game directly support the story and message; if, for example, the paint god can adequately clean up human mess, what is the moral of the story for how responsible humans have to be? Already fossil fuel companies invest heavily in greenwashing adverts to sell people the idea that we can keep consuming and producing at unsustainable levels because some miracle technology will soon magic away the consequences of our actions. You've already partly addressed this by saying there's a timer and a limited supply of water, so presumably the game won't feel easy, but I'd love to also have some story beats addressing this; perhaps Smokestack actually benefitting from your efforts when you're successful and mocking you for helping make people complacent, or the paint god being increasingly unable to save huge swathes and having to pick ever fewer species or areas to protect. Your final provocation bullet point is a good idea for how defeating Smokestack could be played; whatever his defeat represents, the forest has already been changed. There's great tragedy in this, but always things capable of growing atop destruction.