Sorry you felt this way! There should be a 8 step tutorial that appears on the left side of the screen when you start a game, but it's very basic, don't know if you saw that. But I'm already reworking it and the experience should be better in the next version.
Viewing post in [Alpha 1.02] First Public Release! comments
I think the web version is behind, actually. The downloaded Windows version has exactly what I was looking for.
This is a really solid prototype! I'm definitely looking forward to more. I had a lot of success stacking up all my upgrades on one branch type. That'll be an interesting design problem for you to solve, since that was probably not the intended behaviour. Having mutually exclusive upgrades in the future (eg, an "ice" upgrade that slows and a "fire" upgrade that does AoE), might be one way to encourage a more complex build.
Also, it seems like all the upgrades give a percentage of the base values only (eg a 10% price increase always increases the price by 5). I'm not sure if this is intentional but it struck me as weird enough i figured I'd mention it here.
Oh wow thanks, just realized that the web version wasn't updated, it was playing version 1.00 instead of the current 1.02. Just updated all versions to 1.03 with some quality of life changes.
Has for the upgrades, yes the goal is to eventually have each plant have different uses / skills. So you could have one that is close quarter and does a lot of damage, one that's super slow but shoots massive AoEs, one with a chain lightning that also puts enemies to sleep, etc... This is the system I'm currently working on and should be coming in the near future.