This game is great!
I'm not usually a fan of incremental-type games, but i tried this one just because there was a post about it on the r/webgames subreddit. I ended up liking this one because of how beefy the upgrades are, it felt like each upgrade i got marked a significant step in the game's progression, which of course made gameplay feel more "relevant" or "important", contrary to how it often feels in a more typical incremental game (<--- opinion)
Besides the gameplay, i felt like the music was really nice. i specially liked the one song that has three repeating flute sounds in it, it was very very pretty. it reminded me a bit of the song that plays at the end of yume nikki. i also kind of liked that one song that has a deep instrument making three noises, followed by a higher pitch instrument doing those same three noises after 1 beat. i thought it was cute
Another thing i liked was the farming mechanic. i unfortunately unlocked it quite late, when i was on stage 14!!! i couldn't really make much use of it, and when i did unlock it, i could only use the farm for a little bit before it became too strong, allowing me to increase the levels of Jill, Jim, and Compensator, but the concept was good, i think it's a good addition to the game, and i definitely did need a way to farm resources faster. it just so happened that the farm was very fast, and also i couldn't unlock it until it was too late. There's a long post by a user below mentioning that the farm was difficult to unlock, and i think i agree. you have to really go out of your way to unlock the farm. i only managed to find out the farm existed by looking at the reviews for the game while i was—coincidentally—leaving the game open in the background to farm for resources :)
The way i actually found out how to unlock the farm, allows me to smoothly transition into the part where i complain about this fun free game that i got to play on a web browser
1. Some information in this game is either obscured (sometimes, i picked up items on a stage, only to return to my equipment tab and find out that the items were neither saved on my inventory, or combined with another one of itself) or told to the player, but not in a way that is immediately apparent, such as the refund mechanic, which i found out around 30 minutes before i actually managed to finish stage 15... until i found out you could hold shift to refund upgrades, i was actually refunding by exploiting a bug i found by accident. if you click moderately fast on an upgrade, you will cause the icon for that upgrade to gradually rise up. i found this to be amusing, so i turned on my autoclicker in hopes of making that upgrade rise super high up, but what i found out instead is that the upgrades were getting refunded! i used this bug intentionally to refund some yellow upgrades, so i could give myself their currency and find out where the farm upgrade was exactly, and how much more i needed to grind to get to it
2. It felt to me like the equipment system started out strong, with meaningful upgrades to your stats by the early equipment, but gradually "slowed down", to where equipment as a whole felt less important, with the eventual addition of the town mechanic making the stat ups granted by equipment feel meaningless in comparison. i went to check just now to see how much a difference it would make if i had no equipment at all on level 15, and the difference is of only a few seconds. maybe it would be cool to have equipment cover a different aspect of the game? instead of having it compete directly with the town mechanic, maybe you could make things like "swords" be "more effective" against a certain type of enemy, compared to "staffs" which could be stronger against another type of enemy. you could even make potions actually consumable!
3. Minor complaint, since grinding was never anything i had to do before i defeated the king, but please please with a cherry on top try your best not to let grinding become a part of the game. it's a bit weird to say "don't do this because i personally wouldn't like it", since i'm not the center of the world, but i'd really like to play the full game once it comes out, so if it ever ends up being a game with grinding in mind, i know i'll just end up bored after a while, which would be a bummer
Speaking of things "i personally would/wouldn't like", i have some suggestions to make!
1. I think it would be nice if the game remembered which tab you were last on when returning from a level. it happened to me while i was farming for equipment to upgrade—i would go to a level, farm for a bit, and when i would exit the level, and check my equipment, i would have to move the mouse over to the "equipment" tab. it doesn't sound like a lot, but the levels themselves already require you to move your mouse a bunch around the screen, and my wrist did end up getting quite tired after a bit
2. I also think it would be nice if the game made it clear that armor set bonuses exist. further, i think it would be cool to see *more* set bonuses, and it would also be nice and cool if the set bonuses were more than just "stat, but more". of course, this is easy to say when i don't have to program any of it, but i think the equipment system could be a bit more exciting than it currently is
3. While grinding for resources that Jill was asking for (and he was asking for a lot of them), i found out that, when the game shows you which resource the stage you're on is going to drop, the resource shown on the top drops more often than the one on the bottom, which is never explained in game, but it did make me think that it would surely be convenient to have a way to "prioritize" one specific resource to drop when going into a level. say, if i wanted to farm rat tails (gross), i could perhaps click on the rat tail icon before entering the level, and the game would let me know that from now on, only enemies that drop rat tails will appear on that level, leaving behind all the enemies that don't
4. Sometimes when playing a level to farm equipment, it would happen that i'd get some amount of equipment during the level, but i wouldn't actually know which equipment i got, since there's so much stuff on screen at once. i would appreciate it if the game were to tell me which equipment i got at the end of a level, just like how the game tells me how much of each currency i managed to get during the level .
I don't have a way to transition into this topic, so i will just say that i'm going to report bugs! and oversights! and some typos! it's just one typo actually!
1. When dragging items around in the equipment inventory, it would sometimes happen that every item in my inventory would combine into one spot, so i would have like 10 items all on the first spot of my inventory. You can trigger this bug with three methods.
A) Clicking the "Combine All" button in quick succession
B) Double clicking on an item, then dragging it around
C) Drag an item outside your inventory, drop that item, then quickly click and hold again. Apparently, you'll be "holding" an "invisible item". if you try to drop that invisible item back on your inventory, everything will be affected by the bug
2. When zooming in on the "Upgrades" tab, the limit to how much you can zoom in doesn't seem to be defined. this is probably the least concerning problem in existence, but since zooming out leads to a really charming secret, it's a bit odd that zooming in doesn't actually do anything in particular
3. Refunding has two small problems
A) If you refund an item pertaining to an unlockable tab in the menu, you lose access to that tab, but don't lose the actual contents of that tab. for example, if you refund the "Unlock Town" upgrade, you will no longer be able to interact with your town from the main menu, but the benefits that the townsfolk gave you will still be reflected on your stats, so it doesn't actually "lock" the town upgrade, it just hides it. this doesn't happen with the spells for example, those ones are fully removed if you refund their unlocks
B) If you refund an upgrade that is directly responsible for revealing other upgrades on the tree, the upgrades from that particular branch will still be visible, even though you don't technically own their "parent" upgrade anymore. say, if you refund the "Unlock Equipment" upgrade, you will still be able to access upgrades like "Inventory Slots" which gives you +2 inventory slots, even though you technically "don't have" the "Unlock Equipment" upgrade anymore
4. If you try to "collect" a farm while the farm has produced 0 of its contents, the internal timer for how many of its contents the farm produces will reset back to 0, even though you didn't actually get to claim anything. so, if you click the "collect" button before 1 second has passed, you will get 0 of whatever you're making the farm produce, but the game will still reset the timer, so you have to wait another second for the farm to produce more of its product
5. While on the town or farm tab, hovering over certain items will tell you their name. so you have "Rat Tails" (gross), "Frogs" and "Mushrooms". the problem is that "Fish" are actually spelled out as "Fishs", which is not correct. when there is only one fish, you use the word "Fish", and when there are several of them, you use the word......"Fish"........ the plural of "Fish" is "Fish", i can't really blame anybody for getting that wrong
I hope this long post isn't too overwhelming or annoying to read. i liked this game, i thought it was charming, and i think you're doing really good!! i want to see it be better!!!! thank you for making a cool game!!!!!!