Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
First, I want to talk about the visuals. I like the art style of this game, but I feel like a lot of things need more distinct shapes. Enemies right now are just blobs of paint, as are projectiles. Turrets also feel like this, even though they do have a bit of a design to them. It'd be nice if everything had more shape to them like the bigger boss enemies. Also, I don't know how big the maps will get but if they stay around the size they are now, you're wasting a whole lot of space. I'd say you'd be better off zooming into the field more so that enemies and turrets are can be bigger. This, in turn, can give you more room for detailing them.
Next, sound. Namely, there's a lack of it. Given you're calling this a demo rather than a playtest, this is something that shouldn't really be missing at this time. At minimum, there should be either music or sound effects. Even just one would be beneficial at this stage. So I went back into the game to check something and when the settings page popped up first, I realized that the Master volume was set VERY low by default. Given that every other slider was ALSO lowered from the max, this resulted in me not hearing anything. Rather than set all these sliders to some default value, I'd recommend just setting all but Master to max, then setting Master to 50%. Players can then change the sound levels for themselves from there.
Okay, now for gameplay. This is where the bulk of my feedback is going to be. To start, I love the design of this as a tower defense. I'm so used to TD games simply requiring you to place your tower in an area and having it cover an area depending on the type of tower. However, this makes it that towers are incredibly limited in the areas they can attack. This makes things a lot more strategic, which I love. This limitation is then offset by the player being able to attack as well. You also introduced ideas like shields, paint that speeds up enemies, and ice puddles that slow both the player and their projectiles down. All of this is great to me. That said, the game currently feels way too hard. I made several attempts to get through the ten stages, only to only get past stage 5 once. The player avatar's rate of fire is incredibly slow, even when factoring in the fact that it fires two shots at once, and the cost of upgrades gets very expensive such that you can be screwed over if you don't get lucky in terms of both map layout and the upgrades you get. One of the jarring things for me was the fact that the quality of the upgrades led to a massive jump in price. On the very first upgrade, commons are 50 coins, rares are 100 and legendaries are 200. This implies that a rare upgrade should be worth double a common one, and a legendary should be quadruple of a common, yet in practice I don't feel like it works out this way. In fact, I worry that many of the legendary upgrades may not have any strength to them until much later. For example, the homing upgrade is only useful if you also have enough life time in your bullets for them to make longer travels. The upgrade to spin projectiles around your turret is also weak if you don't have enough life time. Similarly, all of the upgrades that fire additional projectiles in a diagonal can feel pointless if the player sets their turrets up explicitly to go down specific paths, as the pathways themselves don't normally set themselves up to take advantage of that. Now sure, you also have the ability to reroll your upgrades... but that's another 30 coins. So now say your first three turrets are begin with legendary upgrades that aren't useful without additional upgrades to them. Now you have to spend 90 coins just to reroll them and hope you get something that IS helpful during the early life of a turret.
This then brings me to the what is the most problematic part of the game at this time: the fact that turret projectiles hurt the player. I have never seen or heard of a tower defense game doing something like this, especially in a game where you're required to collect your in-game currency or have it disappear at the end of the round. What makes this even worse is the number of upgrades that give projectiles additional shots at an angle. This makes those upgrades have even less value, to the point where I'd argue it makes them have negative value; you are actively punished for using these upgrades. This combination is just very bad game design. Something needs to change: either turret projectiles should never harm the player (and shouldn't even touch them, with shots passing through them) or currency should never disappear. In order to ensure the magnitude of this is understood, I would call this a terrible game if neither of these issues are fixed. To me, there is no reason that can offset this, especially not the idea of trying to make a challenging experience. There are many ways to add difficulty without resorting to bad design. So please, PLEASE fix this. I love the concept of this game on so many levels and I don't want to see it marred by something like this.