1. on the options page, set the game to "easy" the first time you play it, until you learn all the things you need to learn to make the village prosper. it is not the village that is lacking, it is you.
2. check out the guide section for complete solutions to all the puzzles. that will take all the bricks out of your briefcase.
3. until you know what you are doing and can keep the villagers alive yourself, backup your paused save game file before you go to sleep so just in case something bad happens you can restore it. Here are backup/restore instructions for VV2. For VV1 it is the same except the files are located in ProgramFiles\VirtualVillagers I believe.

Welcome to the forums,
-Borg