Super cool concept! I'd thought of the idea of using ecosystem loops but couldn't think of a way to realise it into gameplay, this is a clever way of doing so! I wasn't expecting much of a clicker game to be honest, but I it was a lot more engaging than I thought it'd be. I was rather confused as to why we'd want to click to *reduce* at first, but I got the hang of it. Really rewarding to see your ecosystem stabilise at high populations, even if it doesn't last forever haha. Interesting to build and maintain a sort of 'factory line' using your limited resources in order to exponentially increase said starting resource. Super neat way of demonstrating through play the intuition of how ecosystems can collapse under instability and how repopulating or culling certain populations can help bring it back into equilibrium.
If I were to nitpick (these mostly aren't really problems, but suggestions if you decide to build on the concept):
- It's possible to accidentally lower your click count in the upgrades by buying them in the wrong order. 'Click count' is also not the most intuitive name, I almost didn't buy it because I thought it might *set* the number of the resource to that value.
- It could do with some quality of life! Like more clearly indicating how much of what is going where, so we can identify the problems in our ecosystems easier. Sometimes I'd suddenly start mass dropping population and it always caught me off guard! Perhaps some graphs over time might help?
- More complex interactions could be interesting, but perhaps get confusing. As fun as the current visuals are, I think some clearer lines between nodes might help!
- Obviously one of the criteria we're rating is audio, and there is none, which is unfortunate! Feel bad about rating it low in that row because it's a super interesting game otherwise!
But yeah, overall had a good time with it. Great work!