The short read of my comment is: I agree with many of the other comments here, and find this initial concept interesting. When it has a significant update I would greatly appreciate coming back to see more.
That said, I have some thoughts I'd like to share.
I echo the same sentiments as most others in the comments: apple seed RNG feels too high and gameplay loop has a lot left to be desired. I would like to throw out some suggestions for what could help change up the gameplay. These may already be ideas in consideration, so take this instead as "things I would look forward to seeing!"
In the beggar sections, I think being given some sort of choice options would be a bit more engaging. Like how you are forced to leave because of the police warning, maybe other random encounters could happen. I see the people dialogue having some people make "offers", I don't know how explicit you plan for this game to be, but having a choice in maybe taking up one of these offers could be a way that either helps you to earn more money or potentially lose money. I don't think it needs to necessarily be involving "sexual favors", and if it did then we don't need graphic detail. The game has an obvious vibe it's going for and it should try to keep in line with the desperation and the despair.
Some examples of various choice sections could be: someone asking the MC to do something that could potentially land her in trouble (ie. go throw a brick through the window of this place, like cruel and degrading pranks that have chances for consequences with the police), having someone she knows from school or work or family that maybe pities her or uses the opportunity to bully her, or having someone actually give her food instead which could maybe improve her health in a minor way (more on this in the vending machine section).
While you feel more helpless just sitting and waiting for people to give you money, I think that sense of desperation can still come through with more engaging moments like this. Certainly would help break up the waiting and make it feel all the more special if used sparingly.
In the vending machine sections, I think instead of tying the RNG purely to the amount of money punched in, it could also rely on the inputs of numbers put on the numpad. I see the vending machine art has a bunch of buttons, so it might be a case where a certain amount of money + a certain code combination could help you in getting a specific type of food (bugs, body parts, "normal" foods) and it may help to also make it so you can discern whether the item is a food or a drink.
I played through and only got food why my MC was dehydrated. Which actually, in real life, you would survive far less without water. So I feel like if the MC is dehydrated for too long, then that itself could be an ending where she dies to that rather than just starvation. But the idea of putting in money and punching in a code could have you making the choice to help your thirst meter or your hunger meter. (For example: 200 coins with the code 1234 gives you a food item, but 200 coins with 6789 gives you a drink, determined by food starting with odd numbers and drinks starting with even numbers, this could be more randomized to your discretion but it would be nice to have a little more control over just what you could possibly get).
I'm not familiar with the original SCP story so maybe that isn't how it works, but having this addition could then mean you could hide codes in areas or have hints that can steer people to try things and thus get special food items that could lead to rare endings.
As for food intake, I think there should be more immediate responses from the MC to certain foods. If a certain food is conventionally repulsive (rats on a stick or eyeballs in a jug) then I think there should be a more immediate chance of the MC becoming sick or even refusing to eat it. Maybe she will only eat it if she has 0% in her stats, but I also think there should be chances of success that then increase the more that she eats a specific food type. The more successes she gets, it could also become more filling and allow her to sit and beg more without worry of immediately starving.
Maybe it can also psychologically effect her as she may become dependent on a specific type of food. This is where the food RNG can come back into play because as you focus on a certain food group, for example: bugs, then anything that isn't a bug can be more repulsive or be something she refuses to eat.
Additional gameplay elements, I think this game would greatly benefit from an in-game clock or calendar system. It would help to have a limited amount of time day-to-day or to have certain times of day better spent at various places. Sitting and waiting in real time can become quickly disengaging and tiresome if you're doing nothing else to engage with the game. Which is where many folks would like to ask for some sort of additional gameplay feature or for the begging sessions to be shorter.
And what might be nice to go in tandem with this is to choose a location to beg at. So depending on the time of day, maybe you can go to different places to either have more chances for earning or to decrease your chances of getting into trouble. Whether that be by the law or unkind and cruel people.
So maybe during midday, you can go to a park to beg. This can come with advantages and disadvantages, so:
advantage=Police won't bother you for being in the public park
disadvantage=being out in the sun has a chance of causing sunburn and makes you thirsty faster.
Then at night, you can beg by the street near the fancy restaurants:
advantage=more chances for earning money and potentially receiving safe food
disadvantage=police are more likely to catch you. Then rather than have a window pop-up asking if you want to wrap up, maybe have one of the random dialogues in the corner say "That's so despicable, someone should call the cops" the dialogue bubble could be a different color just to help make it more accessible for people to pick up on it being important dialogue to pay attention to.
Now for some very nitpicky, small quality of life changes I think could be useful in just polish and feel of the game:
- when in the inventory, I would like it if I could click outside the window of it to exit or to immediately jump to begging on the streets, my natural inclination because I was trying to outpace the timers was to stock up on eating food and then immediately go back to begging
- sidenote: might help if the timers weren't so fast, this was a complaint I saw brought up and I can agree that it feels difficult to keep up when this game essentially doesn't have a pause screen to allow you a break or give you access to settings in case you wanted to adjust volume or text speed
- dialogue for receiving types of food should not repeat, it also feels like there was an intended order for how many appleseeds you get (at getting 1 the MC comments how she doesn't know if it's an apple seed or not, but if you got a baggy of 100 before then she would comment exasperatedly over the large amount of apple seeds not being enough) maybe there just needs to be a flag for noting when a food item has been previously discovered so she doesn't repeat dialogue OR some way to stack the variable so the first time she gets seeds, she can wonder what they are, but next time she only gets one seed she can comment "more seeds? Really? Does this thing have anything else?" really just to build on that exasperation rather than tie it to individual items.
- capability to skip intro cutscene/tutorial for new games, even if you are starting the game for the first time, some people might be coming to this project from seeing another play it. This isn't necessarily the only reason for it, but I think having the option there to say his ESC and get a popup asking "Are you sure you want to skip the tutorial?" just to ensure players don't hit it by accident and miss out if they DO want a tutorial
- Having a clear indicator that shows up to say "click to continue" would be helpful, could be some text that fades in at a corner or little icon that blinks to show it requires an input from the player to continue
Overall, I see you have a few other games that I am interested in checking out! This could be just a small project that you don't plan to go further, but the concept is neat so I'd love to see an update that further explores it. This is a great start and the polish you do have is wonderful: good art, the music is thematically nice, and a fairly clean and easy to navigate UI! This has an incredible start, don't take all the criticism too harshly as understandably, it is in a proof of concept phase that I see having the potential to build to a good resource management game. As well as tell a twisted narrative involving the psychological effects around food from an unknown source with dubious effects.