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Thanks for playing!

I had originally had the idea for multiple maps, but that didn't pan out and I didn't want to try to bite off too much for the content of the Jam. But the team and I are actively looking into adding a couple more for post jam content, so it's not falling on deaf ears!

Coupling with that, I actually programmed the enemies to work like the player - they have their own stat modifiers for health, attack damage, and move speed. But I couldn't find a good way to tie it into the gameplay loop without taking away from the power fantasy of the player character too much. However, as a middle ground, I'm leaning toward reincorporating it with the new maps, to where they will add stats onto enemy modifiers, making them more difficult on higher level map choices, to give the player the option to interact with tougher content if they choose. I still need to make some more tweaks to get this working in a way that rewards the player (looking into that currently), but it's in the pipeline!

Balancing upgrade costs was a tough one on this project, in all honesty. I did want to keep that progression through the tree like other incremental games have while scaling the amounts, but I think it was really only something I could have ironed in with more playtesting, which was a little lacking on the tail end of the project. I was going to reduce the soul costs for the active upgrades, since those are required, but with the version 1.0 change, I updated it so you always have a set number of souls that spawn on the map, and it was over half the amount required to purchase 1 of the upgrades, so if you find a decent amount of them in one run, you're already making progress, and the original idea was that it was intended for some upgrades to take multiple runs to get. (Plus its already pretty easy to cheese the timer and max out your loot from a run, and I didn't want to encourage that any further with the current state the game is in - maybe I can look the other way if harder stages and more upgrades are implemented, since at least then you'll be risking more to meet higher cost requirements)

On Kronii, I've been looking into her boss fight some more to balance out those attacks that don't feel fair, adding a slight delay between when they spawn and when they start moving, to help give the player enough time to react and avoid them. I originally wanted this fight to be tough, since you don't lose health, and you gain back a big chunk of time when charging a portal, but it might have turned out a bit too difficult without all the upgrades. And hopefully with those updates, I can really lean into the bullet hell mechanics more and go crazy with her projectile count.

And I'm definitely considering getting more upgrades in - I've overhauled the save system for this post jam build, and managed to figure out how to prevent needing to delete save data when the game is updated, so the team and I can go crazy and add or adjust upgrades however we like, and it should apply retroactively, and not require you to reset, so now the worst part is figuring out what I can translate to work with how the upgrade system is built, but I really like your suggestions, and will definitely be trying to incorporate whatever I can that works in the coming update(s?)

Thanks for taking the time to play, and leaving such detailed feedback, it's really helpful!