Really well made and polished. The art, sound, and animation are very well made and really contribute to churning through your items. The UI is fun, non-obtrusive, and very informative which is ideal for a game like this. The core gameplay loop is very good and the concept is solid with a lot of room for expansion post jam. Also making the player remove a portion of their kit part way through is an interesting concept that I like. Since it's already pretty well polished I'll mention a bit more of the nitty gritty on what I thought from the two runs I played.

The difficulty scaling could be bumped up quite a bit, definitely seemed like there were whole rounds where I was just clicking through to the end. You seem to be able to make a pretty strong build pretty early on so having some higher numbers required near the end of the round would be nice. Both of my runs ended with me, having to leave to do something else rather than actually ending the challenge. In a somewhat contradictory point, the number you need for the start of the round could stand to be a bit lower. There were times where I was barely making the cutoff after losing my board between rounds. While I think that's important decision making towards what you carry over, it did feel a little bad to think that I didn't have a chance to grow configure my strategy afterwards. Maybe even displaying the next required Target at the end of the previous round would help with that.

The buffs seem to lend themselves to only specific strategies. It really seems like if you're going for one kind of strategy you've locked yourself into just playing that one for the whole run. Some weapons offer a decent  (e.g. the Katana) but I found I never really felt the need or temptation to switch up my strategy for something that looked good in the shop or include anything that wasn't directly part of the tools that I had buffed. It kind of made the shop phase between rounds feel a little lackluster. Maybe offering randomized buffs based on the area you're in that could target different weapon groups so that when you're back to a base set of weapons you feel more inclined to pick something else up in the shop.

Some items could also use a visual feedback, such as the Dice. Would be nice to know what their multiplier is after they roll versus having to scan the damage numbers on the weapon attack. Particularly if you have multiple dice affecting one weapon. As well in the space between rounds the visual design is a bit more cluttered so it's a little more difficult to figure out which of your weapons are which to choose what to take to the next round.

Outside of that, I was playing on the Web Version and there was some performance hitching at the start but it resolved itself in the second area. I imagine that wouldn't be an issue with the Desktop version. As well I encountered one bug where the Start Next round wasn't working, it happened after I had swapped some weapons around. I was able to get it working again by pausing, clicking out of the window, and clicking back in.

Besides that an incredibly well made game with a lot of inherent strategy and replayability. I'm excited to see where y'all take this!

I spent way too long playing this game. The game feels really good, and I saw you’ve already put it up on Steam.

I found some bugs with the game, mainly with the main menu, after playing it a few times, returning to the menu and changing the settings seems to always have the “Combolite” logo appear everywhere, blocking the screen. I could also start the game while in the settings screen, though at least I could exit the settings while in the game itself.

The balancing seems good, though it’s very luck based, perhaps a way to increase the $15 you get, or permanent minor upgrades after every run would be great. Some runs I get to go very far with just good rolls, while other times I basically can’t do anything. I feel sort of a skill expression for people who have played it more so that their runs don’t just end due to bad luck would be good.

The game seems too big to be a web browser game, and would definitely do better as a standalone app. I had some performance issues running it in Chrome but it seemed to work better in Firefox.

A way to turn down the brightness would be great as well.

Overall a really complete and good game, just needs some finishing touches and it will definitely do well!

I went boomerangs with the green gems and stacked them to infinity.  Got one really high attack and just had 5 donuts before it; and also had the perk that every boomerang gave other boomerangs 2x damage; basically my first boomerang did millions of damage 10/10

Amazing,  I especially liked the shop UI design! Here's some suggestions. First the "move" mechanics, I figured it it even exists after first playthrough, maybe there should be clear indicator it exists and how it works. Also for the moving, it's hard to see what are you moving until you put mouse on it, it's hard to visualize complete picture like that. Since there are some items which boost another depending on the position, that should be shown visually (like lasso shaped indicator).

Finally made my mind up and started playing your game! As expected feels very good and interesting. Seems like there is much depth to the game and my few playthroughs barely scratch the surface of that. Not sure how everyone seems to do insane combos while I am still in the thousands. Probably skill issue. The graphics and sounds are very good and quite match the whole package too!

Only nitpick I currently have is that the attacking part is quite slow, and multiple playthroughs make me really want to speed up that part and continue on expanding the build, only if there is some sort of x4 speed... And the game lags a little bit during the start of the game, not sure if it is normal.

Anyway, as a surprise to no one, this is a very good game! Great job!

I only had the chance to play the first area so can't give too much constructive feedback on the game as a whole, but did want to say I really like the art style and the general vibe of the game as a whole.

Like someone mentioned in the other comments this would work really well as a mobile game. Congrats on the game! 

Okay phew, I thought I was the only one who's game freezes/stutters in the beginning :D WebGL sucks, anyways.. Really fun game! The "choose one of three" upgrade screen looks so good, it reminds me of Assassins creed IV's loading screen or Control. Sound design there is also veery satisfying. I'm not really good at this type of games so my score was bad and I failed :D I guess buying upgrades is strongly advised :D (maybe an optional tutorial?)

Ideas for new weapons: nun-chucks, acoustic guitar (that breaks), maybe magic wand/staff and depending in which direction you wanna go with this game, if you choose funny or "meta" (you know what I mean), then you can literally choose anything. An insult, middle finger, snow ball, bowling ball, chopsticks, paper plane,... the options are endless :D

Good luck in the jam and with your Steam release!

Looking at your previous comments, I think you would appreciate a longer feedback😅 so:

I did one run with a full boomerang build and while it was fun at the beginning it quickly turned into "do I see a boomerang (or a boomerang upgrade), +X permanent damage per hit gem, or just obviously good things (dice, donut)". In the end I just quit because I was getting bored (ended with best round 632784).

Now, take all of this with a grain of salt as I don't have that much experience in this genre of games. If the boomerang thing is actually a good strategy, then it should be more deep and complex and if it's actually a bad strategy (I might just be a bad player 😅) the game should have killed the run much quicker, so I'm incentivized to start a new run with new ideas. I think in balatro the target grows pretty slowly between the blinds(?) but when jumping to a new difficulty it really spikes, so maybe something similar would be nice here?

Also, it seemed like the buffs/passives were really focused on just one specific kind of build (e.g. boomerangs)? I didn't really have a hard time choosing an upgrade to take.

The visuals are 10/10, look very professional and I really liked them. One suggestion would be to start breaking the inner layers of the ball after the first one, so there's more visual feedback in later rounds. There are also some accessibility issues:
— While I'm fine with background moving when I move the mouse (which some people might not be, and it should be an option in the settings) I really don't like the buttons in the main menu moving
— Some texts were hard to read with the crazy background, and I often lost my mouse cursor. If you will be changing the background or doing a custom cursor later, please take that into the account.

I also have some random polish feedback, roughly sorted by importance:
— If the weapon tooltips were long they went off the top of the screen, which made it impossible to pick the X  best weapons (at least in my case where the only difference was amount of damage at the top of the tooltip)
—  Maybe in addition to the speed in settings, speed up the animations depending on the expected length of the fight? (e.g., there are a lot of weapons or weapons with long animations → speed up)
— Considering that each weapon can only have one gem, could it be displayed on the pedestal so for example it's easier to locate a weapon without a specific gem?
— Showing a shop with $0 at the beginning of a new area was confusing to me
— I locked a weapon without noticing and was confused what the lock icon meant. Figured it out eventually, but maybe add "Locked (RMB to unlock)" or sth?
— Moving weapons around didn't feel that intuitive, I would have preferred more drag-and-drop behavior (but in the end I figured it out so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
— In the "Choose X that remain" screen there should a piece of UI showing "Selected Y/X" and the proceed button should be visibly disabled until you do it
— When it goes into the select screen, and it shows "It's time" (or something similar) I would add an explicit "press to continue". I'm conditioned by games to wait because maybe they will continue by themselves while I'm clicking, and then I will skip to the next part by mistake.

Good luck with Steam! (I might try to do a steam release with my game too, so hopefully it goes well for both of us 😅)

Great game, super well made and polished. I really enjoyed the twist at the end of each world where you have to select a few to bring with you. The game was very well crafted and almost entirely bug-free (lucky clover didn't seem to stack the way the text would imply?). The loads felt a little clunky (BIG load at the start and my game would freeze every time a new visual effect had to appear). But neither of those issues really hindered the game from feeling very complete and well-crafted. Kinda small but I was really impressed to see how much settings you took the time to include in a game jam game.

I actually ended up making a similar type of autobattler game, so it was really interesting to see where our designs diverged.

P.S. I gave Umblight a play while looking at last jam's submissions and really enjoyed the hidden information mechanics on the cards. Very clever stuff, looking forward to that full release eventually.

I really like this game! I think its appealing, addictive, and fits the jam theme well. I had some frustrations in my run from not really understanding whether luck multipliers stacked or not (I had a 5x(?) multiplier on a banana, as well as 2x multipliers from buffs, but I dont think it ever multiplied. Was I misunderstanding something or just unlucky?) I also think that while the overall game loop is great, theres some disconnect between it and the presentation. Attacking a ball in various environments doesn't really feel.. great. I think if you could find a way to make this a bit more logical and tie into the gameplay it would take it to a new level. Similarly, the art is pretty nice but showing it from a top down view makes the grass look a little sparse in the first area, and the readability is not always that great from zoomed out top-down view: red squares and red triangles kinda feel similar for instance. Im giving you a lot of feedback because I know you'd probably want it and I think you guys already know the game is good! So, well, done overall and with some additional visual cleanup I think this could be worth taking further after the jam for sure.

An excellent roguelike game. the glitch with the red cube makes it busted as I got around 90,000 with only that cube alone and it infinitely scales. Can't wait to see where this goes. Also speed up options and cosmetics for the sphere/weapons would be neat. Test cube high score: 139084800000

Easily a top 10 game. Yes, its very addicting, polished and professionally made, there shouldn't be any doubts about it. I don't see a reason to comment much on  the good sides since there are a lot and many mentioned it before - next big thing imho. I like it even more than Umblight tbh. The only few things that I didn't like - Background of main menu and tooltips. For me they were very intrusive and taking a lot of attention, especially the white color. The tooltips also blend a little bit with the background due high opacity but yet again, both of these things are my personal feelings, maybe others will disagree with that.

P.S. Chirping birds on forest bg was an excellent little detail.