thank you so much for the feedback! this is genuinely super helpful.
the mixels are something that didn't occur to me, but now that you've pointed it out I can't unsee it haha. we randomize some of the scaling on the tree, bush, and rock assets to give the map a bit of variety, which I think is where most of the different pixel sizing comes from. I think if we were to have made the assets ourselves and had the time to, we might have just made different assets for the different sizes. it's definitely something i'll keep in mind for future projects, thanks for pointing that out!
the game indeed came out a bit harder than intended! the core gameplay mechanics came together about 24 hours before the submission deadline, so we didn't have as much time to playtest and tweak it as we would have liked. ideally we would have made the sheep stay much closer to the fire at first and stray further over time.
this was our first jam, so we didn't anticipate how the difficulty would come out (or at least I didn't). we'll absolutely try and suss that out a bit more for future projects (especially for cozy ones haha!)