Some reactions after finishing the demo:
- Cool concept. I mostly enjoyed it, and wanted to keep playing to see what happened next.
- Starting off, things were straightforward enough. First couple of minutes nothing seemed out of place.
- I didn't love the layout of the tech "tree". It's not clear that things are connected to other things, they just kind of show up eventually. I didn't like that the items moved around, instead of having a fixed layout. It made it confusing to know whether I was looking a new upgrade, or just a stronger version of one I'd already gotten. I'd consider a more traditional tech tree that clearly shows the hierarchy.
- Money scaling feels off balanced. It seems like they were increasing money earned by 2-3x, which kind of throws the rest of the tree out of balance. I think it would feel better if the money costs and earning was a bit toned down.
- Electric is too powerful, to the point that it didn't seem to make sense to ever get explosions. Pretty early on, electrics just clear the whole screen, no matter how many logs I'm creating. This means there's no reason to need have explosions (everything's already dead), and it almost means that pretty early on the game has no other gameplay to offer. Every round is identical: I just click one electric to get it started, and everything chain reacts and dies on its own. I'd suggest toning down how quickly you scale up the range and jumps on the electric.
- The upgrade on the fireworks that lets them spawn other fireworks? Maybe if I'd been able to see it coming I would have gotten it sooner. But that kind of broke the game, and started giving me just huge multiples of the money I was getting before. Maybe that upgrade is only a chance to chain spawn another firework. Currently it feels way too strong.
- Okay, now the big one: I strongly disliked the whole "rain" mechanic, and the tech tree improvements for dealing with the rain. Starting off, it felt like there would be rain storms periodically, but as long as I had enough fire, I'd make it through the rain, and have to face a stronger rain a little while later. But here you've got a rain storm that just ends the round pretty much instantly, no matter how big the fire gets. There's absolutely no benefit to buy the Shield improvements for pretty much 99% of the game: You're just going to get killed by the rain instantly whether you have it or not. Delaying the rain doesn't really do anything useful either until the very end, when it lets you build up enough fire to survive. I'd argue that there shouldn't be Shield upgrades early on if they don't do anything useful. Or consider splitting the rain concept into several storms over the course of the round, at 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, etc, so that you can get further and further, but still need to keep up with those upgrades.