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I support your bad decision. Most decisions are bad, at least yours looks fun and takes stones.

Just out of curiosity how much of a stickly stickler is the youtube these days? Like if you hum a tune, or sing it but get all the words wrong does the algoman come knocking on your door or do you have to pretty clearly be trying to rip someone off? Seems like you'd be someone who knows this on account of working in youtubistan and all.

I saw that keyboard, mice, and controllers are good as inputs, is microphone fair game as well so long as we play kindly with whatever you stream/record with?

I see you are playing around with a lot of shader effects. One of the nice things for you all is that your scene is really static you don't need to worry about visual artifacts when you rotate it. I played around with a lot of the same shader stuff you are looking at a while back for my own interest and had a hard time because a lot of the things that looked good replicating what paint does in real life had a hard time looking good when in motion. But you don't have a lot of motion, so I say lean into it and blend between the effects you are playing with based on who is talking, how the conversation is going etc... afterall different people see the world differently, and you can represent that visually really well if you have a few of those effects down

Seeing as my last game in a game jam was about being a crow stealing nuts from squirrels I can't not rate this one. Ok so things you might consider. Not sure where you live but where I do there are three types of squirrels. Fox squirrels are big derpy and gentle. They are adorable, clumsy, and definitely not "with it" I honestly love them but I have no idea how they survive. Red squirrels are small, passive, and wicked fast, think Piglet, but as a squirrel. Then there are Grey squirrels, they are the rogues of the squirrel world, they push around red squirrels, take their stuff, and will readily throw down with other grey squirrels over nothin. They are resourceful medium built and will readily shout at you if you are on their turf, from a distance of course. What type of squirrel do you want your Main Character to be. He sounds like a fox squirrel to me, which would be the most fun honestly, but that may not be everyone's impression of a squirrel is what I am getting at, so be sure to differentiate your MC somehow early on.

Next, I love the concept of having good stuff vs junk stuff. You might consider rethinking Noggins. Especially if you want to make your MC a derpy squirrel. See there is an opportunity here. If you wanted to you could have the player know something about Noggins that your MC doesn't. If you have your MC telling the player and everyone else he thinks Noggins is doing this just to be mean, he's imposing capitalism, a villian, a complete jerk who steals nuts etc. BUT then you have the "good" items Noggins wants be litter... he wants bottles and trash bags, smashed juice boxes, and in general all the trash that humans junk up the park with... He doesn't want people's phones, their jewelry, their wallets... All of the sudden Noggins is a very different character to the player... and your squirrel has no idea. To your MC squirrel Noggins is the villian, he took the nuts. But to the player he's training squirrels to help cleaning up the park. Then the more your MC complains about Noggins he looks like he doesn't get it Noggins is totally playing him, and it is much more interesting.  It makes Noggins both the villian and a "good guy (kind of)." It would be one heck of a twist.

I think this could be fun, I wouldn't sweat the difficulty of the maths portion for yourself, it is going to boil down to summing up how much and in what way the love interest likes the songs, then adding those up and deciding what mood she put the love interest in. Ultimately the part that is going to get sticky is deciding how to key your character in that a certain song will make the love interest feel a certain way, do you do this with clues, does she get some shared interactions where these are in the background, and those go good or bad (an "our song" kind of thing) what drives those numbers and how to communicate them and give the player some choice in how they happen. That's where I'd spend my time.  Maybe circle in on the key sequential moments and start working through those. Also, did we call it lofi in the 90s? Did I miss the boat on that one?

Two things that might help, 

I notice your use of historical photographs as basis. You might look at Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange, they took photos of people living in the dust bowl during the 30s for the FSA. The ones that aren't of the dust and devastation might work for Welkin. They've got some serious living through some stuff vibes and I would think those would fall in public domain.

Second thing. I see you don't have a lot of audio work under your belts but want to voice all of your NPCs. Consider using Audacity with your audio files. Cleaning up mic buzz (which you are going to get at different levels and are going to want at only one) is really easy in audacity. You can alter a file in very specific repeatable ways as well, in other words I would think you might be able to have someone voice multiple characters and between what they do to alter their voice and what you do to process the files differently (pitch adjust etc) you could probably end up being able to make it sound like more than one person and do it consistently.

You might consider how valuable fog could be in being the mechanic for displaying the area the hiker has yet to interact with and the tiles the player has not dealt to the board yet. You could play with the opacity and color of the fog to signify both states with the same asset that way you only have to make one thing but can have it serve two different purposes.

Sorry I won't be able to do a web build as all I know so far is UE and I guess they stopped doing web support some time ago. Makes me sad as well.

As far as your first brainstorming bullet point where I am right now is that the numpad (84562) controls the flap direction. 5 being a neutral up. 5 all of your thrust goes up, and the others are half in their direction and half up, so you still kind of fall and need some up flaps to stay aloft. This is pretty intuitive but has drawbacks for changing camera direction. I need to work on banking for that I think. I haven't quite settled on a banking mechanic for turning the bird yet (perhaps numpad 7 and 9) but I don't know how those should translate into animation that looks like something birds actually do, they don't really lead with their nose like a plane. 

The second point you bring up is something I think I need to take really seriously. It is really nice because I already had already planned on using a feather texture that lacks an RBG color map and just using those channels to mask different feathers (I get my normal and roughness from displacement anyway). Point is for the feathers that are sexy plumage (the blue on a tree swallow) I could lerp between a muted blue and a bright one based on how healthy you are getting. I wouldn't have thought to do this if you hadn't mentioned it. I already want to track the players progress and use it to make the bird sing better based on how well you are doing.

I've given that some thought as well. I don't think I have the ability to intuition required to have the mechanics be fun enough to just fiddle with in a kerbal space program kind of way where you just kind of want to tinker with what you can do. I think it will need to be sort of a survival imperative. I put in a heart rate, (or breath rate I haven't decided) toggle that adjusts the speed you can flap (and ideally stamina/health drain). I set it so that at idle the drain is zero, but... you can't flap fast enough to actually fly... I like that a lot. So you try and fly but you can't get it unless you engage with the mechanic. I think choosing a swallow or a swift will help with that a lot. You have to be in flight to eat so... As of now I think survival simulator is probably the right scope. If I can get to the stage where there is a tutorial fledging level, a survival/attract a mate level and a raise a baby bird level that is a complete game, but might be beyond the time limit for a solo beginner like myself.  I think maybe food-health-song quality might be the way to go where you need to have built up enough strength to consistently sing a good song to get a mate as a player goal. 

I really love the concept art. Is that feathered brush look a post process? If so how did you get it to look so nice mine only get that feel when they aren't near as crisp edged? It is really well done. Scope seems like a lot to do in a month. I'd play this even if there was no combat mechanic, which would bring down the scope some. Your resonance idea is clever changing the character's abilities. You might also think about using it to change the character's perception since you brought up the concept of puzzles. Using geometric shapes for your animals will save you a ton of time on modeling them. You won't need to do much to animate either. Clever. Excited to see what you do.

I love the idea of us submitting our own categories. The UI is intuitive and the concept is solid. It would be neat to add a clock and maybe a time to beat (average solve time or something?)

I love the idea of us submitting our own categories. The UI is intuitive and the concept is solid. It would be neat to add a clock and maybe a time to beat (average solve time or something?)

I will look into how to change those buttons. It (should) work with gamepad as well. The Q and E is actually why most objects where you don't need all four I use top and bottom button which on desktop. What I do is move where the character is looking back and forth. Perhaps if I space them out better with more space between the letters?