itch.io

Thanks for having taken the time to lay out your questions. I saw that you found some answers by browsing the help menus, but in case they weren't exhaustive (and on that matter, it would be very useful to know what they failed to explain), and for others who might have similar doubts:

- On matches doing no damage: not every orb deals damage when matched, some instead increase your block, evasion or heal you. You can check what an orb does by holding click/tap on it during a selection menu or in your inventory. The enemy can also influence your damage with stats and abilities of its own (nimble is one such ability, letting the enemy avoid the first instance of damage). You can browse the current modifiers that an enemy has (if any) by holding tap/click on them, under its hp bar, and similarly you can also check out what it intends to do on its next move, after your matching, by holding its text box.

- On the overall difficulty: the game is balanced assuming that the player is very familiar with the matching mechanics. On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both because the number of combos itself goes into the power formula, and because less items are activated, so your stats output with 4 combos will be noticeably less than half of what it would be with 8. Not only this will result in dealing an unsatisfying amount of damage, but you'll also fail to block attacks that are designed to be fully blockable. I can't do much about making the enemies weaker, because, given the above, enemies are more than twice as weak for someone familiar with the mechanics (in particular the first encounters are all one-shottable): That said, in the game's main page I have provided some special seeds that you can try to make yourself stronger. You're right in pointing out that thinking about stats, relics and the enemy moves while having your hands already full with making sense of the matching can be overwhelming; there's a sandbox mode (seed SANDBOX) that lets you focus exclusively on practicing, but I reckon that it can't be considered a solution to the issue.

>Why would I want more orb types?

There's a lot of answers for this, some subtler than others. Improving your average item quality, mitigating the "overload" attribute on the orbs, removing your bad starting orbs by pushing them out of a color's item slot, skewing your build towards damage/block, synergy with relics, and similar things you can think about, though, admittedly, the demo is much shorter than what would be required for a lot of these considerations to really pull their weight.

>Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying

My goal is to balance waiting times and readability, since the enemy turn can be pretty important when deciding how to match next. Seeing how it was bad enough that you voiced your thoughts about it I will prioritize working on enemies' VFXs, thanks for the pointer.

>As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.

My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effect, but I will experiment with something like this because I would like to avoid some softlock scenarios where a player is accidentally left with no way to do damage.