Palette: Cards & Chaos Demo

Hi,
not sure if you're still reading this, but bought your game as soon as I saw that it's out. It's really fun. The multiple stages before the boss allow for more complex and therefore more fun builds and melee and ranged seem equally viable.

Besides maybe some minor inconveniences there really isn't anything that'd need further improvement in my opinion.

In case you want to take the extra steps tho, the the only things that come to mind would be:

1. One time I've seen one of the bigger variant of the hammer guys be stuck in one of the smaller rooms with these columns/walls in them. Stuck in a sense where he could only move in one part of the room, but couldn't access the other parts, because he couldn't pass the columns/walls.

2. Maybe remove collision from already opened chests, so players don't get stuck on them (might just be a me issue tho).

3. And I've seen the game has the "hard" tag, but the game seems to be quite a bit easier compared to the demos. Not sure if that is intend or just a byproduct of the changes you made.

BUT there is one thing that I feel like needs much improvement and that's advertisment! The game does deserve some attention. I don't know if you are aware of it, but advertisment is a very very important aspect for a games success. I'm not telling you to put money into an ad campain or something, but for example just a few shorts and tiktoks could already go a long way. Granted there is no garantee for anything, but I think it's worth a try.

Also maybe add a note on here, that the full version is available on steam.

Hope you have a good day and I'm definitely looking forward to any potential future games.

I have some more feedback, after playing the 0.02 demo.

First I like the addition of the campfires and the refinement is a great gameplay addition as well. The new cards are fun and the melee enemies make the difficulty progression feel smoother.

But there are also a few things I would like to suggest.

1. I feel like the standard range attack is a little weak compared to the melee. The melee has higher damge, can block projectiles and can hit multiple targets in a single hit, while range has only that, range. Also since your working with multipliers on the cards the differences in damage only get bigger, as you progress.

Two ideas to solve that would be either just a higher base damage or a second, stronger melee enemy type, so melee becomes more dangerous for the player and range has more advantage.

2. Thanks for making taking damage more notable, but the stop in music interupts the game flow in my opinion, adding a sound may be better.

3. While I like the refinement rooms, I had a run where 6 of them spawned, so maybe a limit for certain rooms, might be good.

4. Inspired by the enemy, maybe a laser beam attack would be cool, that like lasts for a certain amout of time, but takes longer to cast or reduces movement speed while casting.

One more thing, I haven't payed attention to it, so I'm not sure if it's already there or not, but the boss and later the bosses all need their own boss theme.

Thanks for listening to feedback and improving the game. I'm still excited for the full release, take your time and keep up the good work!

Okay, the reflect card is, low key extremely powerful agnset the final boss.

Or any group with lots of projectle enemys. If its going to get reworked, maybe have a limit on how many projectiles it can reflect, with other reflect cards stacking with it.

I one shotted the final boss and that proceeded to bug the game by spawning him again without a health bar. He was now invincible. Jokes aside this game is actually pretty fun and I can see this turning into something really cool :D

Werid bug i found, killing a laser enemy just as they are about to do a attack will make them do the attack, even though they are dead.

Overall the game is really fun to play, I really enjoyed it. Very good for a game made in such a short time.

However, I do have some ideas which may improve the game

Not sure if this is a bug or intentional, but currently enemies don't get paused when you pause. (with the esc key)

Some quality of life changes could be:
Better visibility on when you are damaged
Option to disable screen shake (or at least reduce it, can get annoying when you have a lot of speed on an attack)
Option to lock the mouse to the screen the game is on (ended up clicking on other monitors)
Chest map icon changes when is has been opened

Some gameplay ideas:

A way to clear a colour from an attack. For example currently with dash paint it will end up dashing after every attack. What if I want to dash once, then attack several times? On some paints removing doesn't make sense (who would want to remove damage?), but for dash (and other future paints) it might be a nice option.

Damage numbers and/or stats on basic cards. For example currently red paint does x1.5 dmg. Ok nice, but how much damage does a regular shot do vs a slam attack? Slam attack vs spin attack? etc. Would be nice to either show damage number for easy comparison, or some kind of display on the attack itself showing some info like dmg, range, etc (or both)

Maybe health is not picked up when at full HP and maybe display not picked up health on mini map? (kinda stealing this from Binding of Isaac)



I know this is a lot, but overall the game is really good and these are just points I thought of which might help improve the game in the future.

Very nice demo. I'm definitely looking forward to the release version.

If it's okay I'd like to leave some suggenstions though.
1. Visual feedback for taking damage could be more prevalent.

2. Melee enemies.

3. Maybe add like different tiers to the colors. Like a special 2x damage red. With the clolor theme in mind you could call it it crimson red or something.

4. Not sure if I saw that correctly, but can you block projectiles with the melee? If yes, that's pretty cool, but would be nice to have in the tutorial rooms.

5. Effects for the character like higher movement speed.

Two more smaller things: Enemies somethimes seem to be stuck in the corners of the rooms and stop attacking and also please let me use esc to close the map.

In the end I'd say: Although there is quite a bit of room for improvement, it's just a demo so  that's to be expected, but it's still lots of fun already. Keep up the good work!