Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!
This is such a cute game! It's also such a great idea for a deck building game. Honestly, while playing it I found myself too enraptured to think about what I was going to say here for feedback!
The only thing I could think of was in regards how the cards just work and the gems. As I made my way through the levels in the demo, I continually found it more and more difficult to play the cards I wanted due to a lack of gems. This really came to a head when I got to the final stage and found myself just unable to get a maxed score for the audience. It made me wish I had more gems per round, especially once I started getting the cards that would do two colours at once. Since they only use one gem each, you just don't have the means to play another card with one of those colours unless it ALSO happens to have the same colour.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding part of the game, too. While playing, I kept aiming to never use a colour that wouldn't increase the audience or finale gauge in that round and it could be that this was the core problem I was having. In my mind, it felt like playing a colour I shouldn't play was somehow punishing. Yet when I went back for another round, that didn't seem to be the case. Speaking of, I wish instead of returning to the title screen and seeming like the demo was done that it went into a proper round of the game. I only realized this when I went back into the game to check something out for this write-up and realized I could play more.
Now that I've done that second round, I think there's something else I have an issue with: the fact that what the audience wants is always the opposite of what will increase the finale launcher. I had a card that, when played, duplicated that card into the other launcher. This would be all well and good if things ever lined up to let me use it and increase both gauges but I never saw this happen once.
With this all said, I think I can see a few ways to improve the game and make it more interesting.
1. There should be times that what the audience wants in a round is the same thing that the finale launcher wants. That way, any card that has this duplication effect will actually be useful.
2. Unused gems should be carried over to the next round. You already have an animal who makes it harder if you don't use all of your gems. I feel like the best way to balance this out is if not using a gem allowed it to be in the next round, giving the player more options.
3. There should be more standard cards that only use one gem. When you start the game, every card you have takes two gems, and once you start getting cards that use one gem of two different colours it can be hard to use those gems up.
4. The player shouldn't completely discard their hand between rounds. While I wouldn't say they should keep all of their cards, I do think letting the player keep some would be a good idea. That way, if a player uses one card that draws another card and it ends up being something they can't use (because, say, it needs gems they don't have due to spending a gem to even draw the card), it's not a complete waste because they can hold onto it for the next round. There could be different ways to do this, from keeping all cards in hand and just filling the hand up with new cards to letting the player choose a certain number of cards they retain.
Otherwise, this game is adorable and fun and I plan to play more on my own. <3
P.S. I love the music. Could I get a copy of it? <3 I collect tracks from FQ events to use in my streams.
Edit: I'm playing the game on my own and I'm realizing that some of the things I brought up ARE in the game (such as getting more gems). I'm also realizing I didn't understand how the Locked function works. I didn't realize locking a colour meant you didn't need to have that gem anymore to use it.