Hi diealot, nice to see you're enjoying the game, to answer your questions in order.
1. I'll get you back on this one, but intro song and all the map songs where made by a friend specifically for this game. I'll ask him to post his song somewhere for people to enjoy them.
2. I'll look into it :)
3. You can use the shards to like an item to obtain the elemental blessing (skill) on a character. While the holy feather is for reviving dead characters. Both are used as items.
4. There is a shop in the "Metal" zone, the part that looks like a town that sells vulnearies.
5. The enemy portraits are defeault assets from Srpg Studio.
6. Don't worry, the first chapter is the whole game, there are 13 characters because you get a different group based on wich part of the map you start based on the first choice you make. In what part of the map did you start?
7. To avoid spawning all enemies on top of you and make the second part of each zone play similar to make sure they are beatable.
8. Oh, this was for game jam and didn't get the time to make unique palletes and animations for all the new characters, so I removed them. I have an update that adds the animations, some small fixes and text revision in the works but I still don't have an ETA on when I'll publish it.
And regarding the chronology, don't worry it will make some sense after the ending. :D
