Thank you for playing! I’m glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed the game eventually. I agree that in its current state, the gameplay is not that prominent and needs improvement.
Basically, the energy (or QI as we call it internally) is supposed to be your stamina, mana and shield from the damage at the same time. However, we didn’t have time to add enemies and combat, so it only works as a stamina/shield at the moment.
We tried two different approaches to the hitboxes of the clouds. At first, we made the hitbox equal to the whole cloud as it is visible on the screen, but then it looked strange when a character, clearly standing before a tree, was hit by a cloud that was passing far behind the same tree. So we decided to make the hitbox a rect below the cloud’s base. As if they were almost flat 3D objects. So now the cloud only hits the player when their base positions +- collide. Ie, if a character visually steps into the base of the cloud. It works a bit better, but maybe not ideal.