Hi! Thanks for your kind words.
Aside from the soundtrack, Hive Time was made entirely on Linux. As noted on the article you came from, I've written for GOL from time to time.
Itch's incremental uploader tool butler handles compression. I can't remember whether it makes tarbombs by default or I left a trailing slash in when writing my build scripts, but either way, most archive utilities stick tarbomb contents in a folder automatically AFIK, so it's never been high on my priority list to investigate - you're the first person that I can recall mentioning it in the past two years.
I'll make note and if it's something I can resolve at this end, I'll look at doing it next time I have a patch big enough to remove the advantage of deltas (such as an engine update).
One of the game's testers plays the game on a raspberry pi from time to time (I assume they're running the game's data file with an arm version of the engine). I've never been able to get the game running well enough to justify officially targeting low powered devices, though.
The tutorial doesn't include any events, and it lasts the full duration of your first Queen's reign, so you're always going to end up with typical hive stuff happening along the way.
All of the event lists are shuffled when starting a new game, so whether Bear Attack ends up occurring at all during a given Queen's lifespan is down to chance. Old Bitey also won't appear until after your hive has reached a certain size, and the maximum amount of damage he does is about 20% percentage of the hive's size (usually less), so it scales to be appropriate for a given hive.
Unlike SimCity, which was Hive Time's biggest influence, all of Hive Time's disasters can be averted or avoided with a little planning and/or responsiveness. Encountering setbacks and learning how to recover from/avoid them is a big part of the experience in my mind, but there's a "skip disasters" option when starting a new game if it's not your kind of thing.
Were there any stylistic choices in particular you felt interfered with gameplay?