Slotbound

your game is so great！

Nice game! I played a steam demo and want to share a feedback!

1. I think there are too much things to keep track of and I quite feel overwhelmed: so you have cores which you get each 5 turns and you buy shop boost from shop - two systems for identical reason.

2. Also, it feels like you overengineered the cores - discriptions like "Once per battle, when there are 6+ enemies, all enemies take 5% of current HP (Lv.1)" literally require a C++ compiler in the head to understand. Could be replaced with "All enemies get 5% more damage" for fun-focusing design.

3. I lack the "queue" system for units. So it's sertanly more profitable to keep your battlefield full (5/5), yet you always need new units for absorbtion. So right now the game forces to do spin->absorb, then spin->absorb several small loop during one wave. Would be more convinient to spend all coins in slots -> get lots of units, then disrubute them into battlefield.

4. The art, sound design and idea are quite impresive.

Cool approach to roguelike progression unique luck mechanics

This is awesome for your first game, keep it up! 

My feedback:

- Make sure it's possible to get some small upgrades in the upgrade tree in the beginning even if your first few runs are going badly. I had to play 3 or 4 games before I really got the strategy figured out and I couldn't really unlock anything in the upgrade tree to help me out. This could turn beginners away. Luckily, the fun of the game drew me in enough to keep playing.

- I would actually get rid of the timer, but that's more of a preference I guess. For me a strategy game should just give you the time to think about your choices, especially if you play it for the first time. Maybe reserve the timer for special levels or challenges? You as the developer play the game with lots of knowledge, while a new player will need to figure out stuff while on a clock, this is rather stressful.

- The combine mechanic is very cool with the different combinations you can make, however, it felt a bit clunky with the toggle button. Sometimes I would forget its on and get an upgrade pop-up and sometimes I would try to combine and not get the pop-up. Honestly, I don't have a better idea of how to implement it, but just putting it out there. Maybe it could already help if the characters have a minimum spacing from each other. Now I sometimes have to move some characters around to make them visible before I can start dragging to upgrade so I wouldn't upgrade the wrong units. This meant switch to dragging, drag all units to separate them and then switch to upgrade, then drag the unit to the unit I wanted to upgrade, then switch to dragging, then drag all units in combat position again.

Also, noticed you used the awesome unit assets from LyaSeek, which I have been using for a game as well.

Played it for a few hours yesterday and the potential is definitly there.

First thing that comes to mind is to expand the soundtrack. The current music loop gets repetitive pretty quick so increasing lenght and variation might be in order.

The mechanics are there and it already seems pretty balanced at this stage so just keep it up I'd say.

I saw you getting some heat on reddit for using AI but I wouldn't let it get to you, you've got enough work as it is as an indie dev and you're not always in a position that you can hire artists.

Keep up the good work!

Very fun game, I enjoy playing it a lot.

It'd be nice to add an option to save the run because on hard difficulty runs can take a while and it sucks losing the progress.

I'm already looking forward to the full version, the game is addicting.

This game was actually pretty good it has a lot of potential. Hope to see you keep working on the game.

Played for around an hour or more and its incredibly addicting! Great job, I'll definelty keep playing :)!