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.
Well, that was a curious experience. Animals tower defense to save the magic kitty! It's pretty simplistic, but also has a lot of depth due to how you have control over the path. I like that!
So my feedback boils down to two things in general. First, move the "start stage" thing to the middle of the screen. Like after you decide where the cat goes for the next stage, the thing that pops up should be in the middle. Instead, it was the far right for some reason.
The second has to do more with the general gameplay. While this has a lot of depth, I find that later levels can start ramping difficulty fast. For example, I was trying to do level 1 difficulty (instead of 0) and I could not get past more than 2 stages in the second area because, no matter what cards I picked, I could not deal enough damage to save myself... because I couldn't get enough cards played in time because the cheapest tower card is 3 energy. Even if you take an energy-heavy path (something you end up suffering from a lack of different cards for), you just don't have enough energy to get things up in time. I had 14 energy, and this basically amounts to three tower and only if I don't need to do a draw to get the right card. However, the enemies are so strong that it feels like I need to have five towers up immediately if I want to be able to keep up. This is a common problem with tower defense and puzzle games, where the scaling is made too steep too fast and it becomes impossible to beat from an early point.
Like, is there any way to upgrade cards and make them stronger or reduce their magic cost? Is there a way to upgrade your wizard kitty beyond getting just +2 to your maximum magic? Like something to make it recharge magic faster or maybe heal itself over time or per stage? These are the sorts of things that will help you expand the gameplay to make difficulty scaling make sense. Otherwise, you're just putting people into an unwinnable numbers game.
This is what I think is the main thing this game needs: to balance its scaling and then aim for expanding the cards and adding upgrades so that even higher difficulties will be possible. Actually, since this has a roguelite element to it, why not make upgrades that carry between games? Only things that affect the kitty, of course.