Alright, I'll respond to each Point individually.
I've been running around the idea of having the player "sprite" change to transformed creatures "sprite" for a bit now. This will definitely be a feature in the future, plus it adds an additional way for you to tell if you transforming.
I like the hub area mainly for Aesthetic reasons but i can see how it can be annoying to move around it. i might keep the long hallways but add a way to teleport around so you can quickly see everything you've unlocked.
I do plan to add more things to the shop eventually. honestly i'm just pretty slow at producing content updates (things like more items/spells/enemies ect). Though for the suggestion of adding tips and tricks as a purchasable shop item now that is an interesting idea. The main benefit of doing that would be to control the pacing and reward players for figuring things out themselves. Though it would be a off putting to newcomers. Maybe simpler things should be shown in a standard tutorial message but leave the advanced stuff to the shop. i'll think on this a bit more to see how i would want to implement it.
Like i said before refunding shop items should be pretty easy to do. though it would get weird if i decide to add tips to the shop as it would be redundant if you could refund though.
Adding Starter forms in the same vein as the player would probably blow the scope of this project out of the water in terms of writing. and unfortunately wouldn't be viable. however if we forgo writing new descriptions we suddenly get a very cool mechanic. balance would be a bit of an issue and maybe some scaling would be in order but this could turn into a neat idea.
kobolds and cats have the same internal "danger level" and yeah, i can probably tone them a bit down. though i wonder if i can solve the problem forever by introducing enemy scaling. have the enemies spawn initially weaker if they spawn too early but have them return to normal strength a few floors later. This won't solve the TF priority so to compensate i might give the cats a lower chance to tf.
Having cats attack other things and kobolds use tools are neat mechanics. it would really sell that this is probably an ecosystem with maybe intelligent creatures. though i would want this aid a more complex player transformation system.
As for certain body parts appearing and disappearing. now that the armor system was changed to have global armor this works out alot better then it did before. So i'll probably find a way to implement it.
The reason why examine self is a bit barebones is that i want to have an mechanic called "upcasting" for spells, where you can spend more mp on a spell to give a more powerful effect. i actually have a lot of the code done for upcastingdone in advanced but i haven't implemented it mainly because i have to design UI for it (if you couldn't tell i really hate UI design and tend to procrastinate on it). So i want upcasting examine self to give this additional information.
Honestly that's a good idea, having a cool down for some of the spells. i've been hesitant to limit reduce curse for a bit mainly because i need more ways for the player to tell their transforming. as you've noticed i want players to be able to intuit if they are transformation, but in order for that to happen i need to give players a way for them to know if their transforming.
Adding a slow curse spell is an interesting idea from a game design perspective. it only really makes sense if reduce curse was on a cooldown. the purpose of the spel would be primarily to not idea while waiting for reduce curse to go off cool down. it is also a way to make reduce curse more mana efficient. as slowing the curse between casts makes it so you need to cast reduce curse less overall. This idea has a lot of potential. Also converting it into an item. eventually you wont start with every spell in the game, and instead must copy the spell from a scroll. but the scroll can be used to cast the spell for free but can't copy it unless you find another scroll.
Having death instead speed up transformations is a pretty good idea. mainly because it effectively does the same thing as progressing the transformation instantly but it allows you to see the in-between stages. Though i will still cost you a hunger penalty for dieing.
But i second the idea of completely reworking the system, the current system is fine for getting the idea of the game across, but it really isn't robust enough to be the main focus. i've been wanting to change the system for a while now but i've been stricken with a terminal case of analyze paralysis which is why i've been endlessly teasing a rework.
Alright As for the transformation change overhaul. This... is significantly better and a more refined system then what i already have. i have a kinda similar system in place internally called the "Transformation multiplier". but this really well encapsulates everything in a concise way.
The grade system is great, and i like the idea of your body being so resistant to transformation changes that you revert back to your base form. and likewise you going from 0 to 100 if your human form is really unstable (i'd like to imagine a long hikes transformations here). and it adds to the overall theme.
Overall the machinic itself seems to be pretty simple, at least on the surface which is really good for game design. its simply "higher grade = faster transformation" but its a flexible enough system to have depth.
This is the part that seems a bit odd to me though. as i'm not really sure how to conceptualize it. how does the value change exactly? if i had to guess the value should "nudge" whenever something happens. like taking a hit or starvation. the direction of the nudge should be determined on 2 main factors. your distance from 3.1 and your situation. so lets say your situation is +.3 from hunger +.2 from low health, and probably some other factors. giving a total of +.5, and lets say your distant from 3.1 is .3. we'll use this as our lower bound. so we'll pick a random number from -.3 to .5, let's say we rolled .1. so our direction is positive so we should "nudge" our current factor in the positive direction. the distance of the nudge should be a fixed value, lets say .01. and depending on the direction we add some multipliers, so lets say we multiply the positive effect of this nudge by 0.9 if we are playing on easy ect. and then add some fixed values depending on other factors such as spells or debuffs so +.02 for starving giving us a total nudge of +.029 to our value changing it from 3.4 -> 3.429 Am i imagining this correctly?
Oh and for difficultly in general. i am probably going to have 1 difficulty for the foreseeable future. i find it easier to design for a naturally hard difficulty and i'll see about adding an easier/harder difficulty much later down the line.
Either way i think i've been writing for 2 hours. but thank you so much for the feedback and ideas! As i've said before these are invaluable to me. and honestly i'm very interested in seeing what are your thoughts on the cursed items. Thank you for playing and giving feedback