Thanks for giving it a look, I appreciate it.
As you mentioned, an interactive tutorial would have been pretty needed to make this game digestible without multiple sessions to play it. I wanted to add one, but ran out of time. If this was a 72 hour jam, it would have been the big day 3 addition.
I’m glad you appreciated the art for what it was, aka not great, but not terrible.
I can do better pixel art (though not quickly enough for a game jam). This art was from 3 artists, myself, my teammate, and my wife. She did the buildings and trees, @goomplez the tiles, and I did the stick man and the weeds. My art was mostly aimed to be servicable, and then I got too caught up in the programming to clean it up during the jam.
If you do give it a more proper try, I am interested in the pacing.
If you immediately go for weeds, you can get them under control quite easily, but then it seems to slow down the game too much. Overall, the pacing seems either too much or too little. If I were to spend more time on it, that’s probably the second issue I’d address, making the pacing a little more adaptive. Right now, the weeds do not care what the player does.