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Not harsh criticism at all!

Even more so, I am flattered by all these comments, because almost each one of them has something positive to say. I am fully aware of all the current issues with the game, it’s in a veeery early stage, and I am working on fixing them all in my free time. I am doing it solo, I am doing it slowly, and it’s just a little creative outlet of mine that allows me to do something that I truly enjoy, which is creating something that would bring people at least some small bits and pieces of joy.

To be honest, I have not expected the game in its current state to gain any sort of traction at all, I posted it more so just to have people test it and point out things which I am already unable to see and “feel”, because making a game of any kind, and especially of this kind, is a very iterative process, and at some point you just become kind of numb to it. 

But the game got a lot more attention than I expected, so I am very surprised, slightly frightened, but also more than eager to develop it further!

I have no such goal as to compete with Cookie Clicker. Yes, this is an iteration of the same kind of game. What distinguishes it is just the setting, the jokes, and later on, hopefully, when the game itself is somewhat closer to being finished, some good art on top of it all. 

I am decent at writing and making pretty pixelated assets, but I am terrible at programming and I’m learning more on the go, so I am trying to get the difficult part out of the way first, and then hopefully we’ll get to the good part!

Anyways, thank you for your comment and good criticism, please feel free to add more when I put out a new version of the game!

As far as the trials, I did want them to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and slightly tedious, hopefully they're not too crazy, I tried to make them clearable within 3-4 minutes haha

And the void echoes are actually time-based, they start appearing after Ascension 12, once every couple of minutes.  Some of the later ones are locked behind higher ascensions but all become available by and at ascension 20!

Hmm, I thought I definitely got it fixed in this version.
Will absolutely be looking more into this and thank you so much for your feedback, super happy you enjoyed it regardless!

You probably haven't gotten to them yet as void echoes are what I intended to be the "actual" little story for the game, so it's supposed to be more of a late game achievement.

Basically, once you reach Ascension 12, a small glowing "✦" symbol will start appearing somewhere on the screen, and during the latest fix I have also added a "void echo drifts..." writing under the symbol to make sure that the player understands what it is. If after achieving Ascension 12 and playing for about 5 minutes you don't see anything like that pop up, please feel free to let me know!

As far as corruption goes, surely that'll be improved as well. I wanted a somewhat active but not "too urgent" of a system (since it's an idler game after all) that would play into the idea of sacrificing small amounts of current pastry for a long-term future benefit, or rather absence of an incoming malus. But in true Lovecraftian manner, I wanted there to be a twist where sometimes corruption would actually give you bonuses, and later on in the game you would get an upgrade that makes corruption purely beneficial so it kind of enhances in my mind the feel of "giving in" to the whole dark Ascension theme. Sounds good on paper, but in practice I do understand the system is still pretty flawed!

I have left the early game almost completely unchanged with my last update, but I did tweak the later ascensions a bit (more detailed breakdown in the devlog). 

Thank you guys, I've found the issue and had it fixed! Some changes to the game's balance have been made as well. The new version should be compatible with your previous saves but I would recommend to save wipe through the "tools" section.

Thank you so much and absolutely great points!

I am trying to come up with a more “elegant” way to make that quest less tedious, and instead of just disabling certain bonuses, which to me seems like a cheap solution, maybe I’ll just have to change the quest’s structure entirely or add something interesting to the corruption’s behavior for that specific quest.

Balancing progression is absolutely a work in progress! It’s surprisingly a complex system to nail (for me), because it can’t be linear, or the game becomes boring and predictable, can’t be purely logarithmic, because then it becomes too grindy at a certain stage, and then too boring if you try to just balance it with more bonuses, so what I’m doing is a mix of linear, logarithmic and manual settings at different stages of the game.

As far as void echoes go, are you not getting them at all? Or have you stopped getting them at a certain point?

Currently the game is set to be “completed” after achieving ascension 20