Day 5 - End
Very good progress today. One thing that really helped was that I was able to build a spreadsheet model of the core gameplay and use this to tune the parameters to get the right level of difficulty and interest. That saved me a great deal of time running the actual game because I could iterate around over parameters (there's about 20 of them!) much quicker and see how the whole game would play out
I also managed to play through end-to-end and I'm happy that the feel of the game is what I was looking for. I still need to complete the dialog (yes, still stuck at 30%!) and do some polish and tuning but I think I have enough time for that tomorrow before I have to submit.
Here's another screenshot.