My Compo game was done in time. I submited just before the submission hour, it's way more convenient when you have work the next day (Europe submission hour is at 3AM).

I'm pretty proud of it since I managed to make a game you can play and is quite fair. But I found some points I could improve for the next jam.

It's recommended to play it before you continue reading.
You can play "Cats Can Do That" here.

What I've done:

• I made the game pretty much like how I thought of it in terms of gameplay. It's blazingly fast to prototype, add features and tweak values on the fly with Unity.
• I made the game balanced and fair, for my first management game I found a workaround for making the balance easy (pro tip incoming!).
• I made all the graphics needed and minimum sounds. In terms of time management I rocked!
• I eat healthful food and sleep well. I drank coffee only for the submission hour.
• The overall game is quite finished. There is all the elements to start the game without asking for how to play or looking in the comments to find clues.

What I've missed:

• Even if my schedule was respected, I spend a lot of time just thinking about how to implement a feature. It's mainly to measure pros and cons, but I think I literally did nothing in front of my PC during 4 to 5 hours because I wasn't able to decide how to code something.
• The art style isn't consistent. 2D flat illustrations doesn't fit well with 3D objects, lights and reflections. I should have made it all flat lights (nolit).
• I spend the first quarter of the weekend to find a game idea. But I guess it was worth it. I lost so much time in a lot of aspects.
• Unity is good but way oversized for a game that doesn't need 3D at all. Build size are big, uploads are slow, but at least I can embed it for you to play online.

Items in my game must have costs equally distributed, so a cat that is twice more expensive produces twice more energy. But this becomes a bit boring. What if I want it three times, or what about 1.8 times.
A simple way to add more control is to use second degree equations (ax² + bx + c) to calculate every property of your item and made them controlled by a single value.

Basically, a cat costs 200 times the control value so a cat of 1 costs $200 and a cat of 8.5 costs $1 700. I did the same for every property so the power represents 2.5 times the value, toast efficiency is 0.8 times the value and so on.

(ax² + bx + c)

The rule can be summarized like this: what's in a tends to grow faster that the control value, what's in b is strictly proportional, and what's in c fades with higher values.

That's it! Play, rate a lot of games and have fun!