Fun game with a great aesthetic and concept! Got pretty good at it after a while. I hope people enjoyed my chicken broccoli stew with broccoli. I didn't fully understand the saving mechanic though, since I often used the most useful ingredients before the end of the day. I also disliked the staples mechanic. My run ended simply because I got unlucky and didn't get any wheat from restocks, and every skipped order required wheat. Would have been more interesting to maybe add a trade mechanic, where I could sacrifice other ingredients for staples to make it a little more fair. All in all though, great job!
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Hey! Glad you had fun, and you're right, it definitely is a game that you improve at after a few repetitions.
We've had an idea before where you could pay for mini-restocks of specific ingredient types. You might pay $5 to get a single random veggie, or a random staple, etc. This would push the game just a bit further into the "money management" side of things, since you're then sacrificing that money from being able to potentially purchase upgrades, and balancing that with how many stars you think you can afford to lose.
The staples are honestly only in there because it just wouldn't make much sense to have certain things substitutable across a whole category (in the later game, this includes rice, milk, and we were considering some others). We did end up giving them double the drop rate compared to other items, but it still certainly comes down to luck. After the jam is over, we're planning on putting out another update that will shift the balancing more towards 10+ day runs and might add that "grocery run" (buy a single item per category) system.