Hi, thanks so much for taking the time to write out all of this feedback, I appreciate it a lot :)
I agree the game needs more visual feedback and particles etc, up until now I've mainly been focused on the gameplay.
Practice mode as it is now was really just thrown in as an afterthought, and it could have been thought out better. At first I didn't think it was worth the effort to do more than a few number tweaks, but I think now it is worth it to put more thought and effort into this mode. I think reducing the number of things to dodge is a good idea. Maybe I will change it around and make what is currently practice mode the ''normal mode', and the current main mode 'hard mode.
I'm not a fan of the idea of hints for what rewards you should pick honestly. I really want to leave that choice completely to the player. But hopefully, if I can balance the practice/normal mode well, thinking about what are the best rewards to pick can really make the difference between winning or losing, rather than it now feeling like it doesn't matter anyway.
I didn't really think about a that much tutorial yet, I guess when you're developing a game it's really hard to gauge what a person who hasn't seen it before will find clear and unclear. It's probably a lot more important than I thought.
The intense colours may be because I'm a bit colourblind XD so I don't have the best idea of what colours to use. Learning about shaders is definitely on my planning, hopefully I can improve on this.
A story is also definitely the planning, but that is low priority for now :)
I have 1 big question, because you say the ability buttons didn't seem to do anything for you. Abilities are pretty important to the game so them not working is a bit concerning. Could you give some more details on this? Did you have an ability picked up, and if so, which one? Did the buttons not work on their own or was it while pressing other buttons? Do you have a non-qwerty keyboard maybe?
Again, I really appreciate the feedback! If you want to stay updated, you could follow me, I write a post for each update describing the changes.
I will definitely try your game, but it may take a while as I'm pretty busy the next few days!