Thanks for the feedback!
I DID do some rather dramatic tweaks to the difficulty not long before the jam was over, because up until that point I was unhappy with how simple it was (I could consistently play through to the end every time with little challenge to Rodney's happiness, for example). This is something I can totally patch though if it's too hard - it's nice and easy to adjust the difficulty of the game. But it is intended to be hard to balance everything, for sure.
Audio was something I wanted to get in, and I totally intended to! But then in the final day I discovered a large number of game-breaking bugs that prevented replay, and that felt more important to fix than adding audio. Totally can do that though - but you're right that thematically it could be hard to do.
The UI I did struggle with, and I think it probably would have been helped a bit more maybe by some better tutorial cues at the start. I'm open to suggestions though!