This is a lot of fun!! Super well polished, very intuitive, the card game makes immediate sense to me - the tutorial did a great job! The fight aspect and the roguelite elements feel wonderful, the map works so well, upgrades are exciting, I love all the character designs and animations, this is just solid all round and I'd love to see an expanded version.
My feedback is minor and focused only on some UX bits that could be brushed up, which you might already be thinking of anyway:
- Take this with a grain of salt, maybe this is just me, but I'd switch "accept" and "decline" around when a minion is offered and make the accept button stand out better. I wanted to accept, but my mind was naturally drawn to the decline button as more accessible, and as I expected the more accessible button to be 'confirm' I lost that minion. I think I expect 'continue/confirm/forward/yes' to be on the right, maybe due to reading direction.
- It would be nice to have an option to cancel out of the 'remove card' option if I end up not wanting to remove one. (that being said, by the time I finished playing , I had a better idea of what I was hoping to do by purging and didn't mind that it committed me to the intention. Since you randomize what cards might be purgeeable I understand that option represents a calculated risk. So scratch that, works great as is.)
- When we get the chance to replace a minion, it would be great to get to hover over the name of the existing minions to be reminded of their effect
- Generally, it would be nice to visualize more when a minion effect jumps into action. I saw it happen once with poison and it was very cool, but it was only after that I put together 'oh, must have been the viper minion' - a little popup animation for them jumping in to aid or something like that would be cool. Similarly, I dropped to below 0 a few times and don't know why I jumped back up again. I finally properly died in round 13 :D
- I realized only later into the game that you can stack the multiplier muscle cards to get multiple multipliers on the same damage card - it made it fairly easy to do 400 damage to some enemies in the first couple rounds. Given the pace of the game that might be fine, but some of the bosses seem underwhelming with taht mechanic in mind, and I don't know if there shouldn't maybe be a cap. I'd at first assumed only the cards right next to each other interact.
This is so so so so cool, I had a lot of fun. And I should really get back to work now :,)