No worries, you made a great job on the game so it is a pleasure to help you polish it and balance it. ;-)
From a player's perspective, just pausing the timer instead of completely displaying the curse's effect is a bit of a pain in the ass though : I mean the game is already paused when picking skills, so I wouldn't really mind If there was a pause as well for curses (it would feel more consistent too). If the players already know its effect they can just close the popup immediately, which is less bothersome than having to check the skill list every time when they don't. Furthermore, it's especially troublesome with curses that depend on a color and make you check anyway (For example the flood curse already causes a big disadvantage, and having to check which color just make it more frustrating.) Also if at some point someone manage to survive for a very long time, they could theoretically have a very long skill list that goes off-screen and couldn't even check the curse's effect.
Well I do know very well how to deal with the different enemies (I wasn't a top player just thanks to overpowered combos, I still had to survive the early game to have the possibility to build the right synergies :-p), but I often find myself stuck in the early game in its current state :
- Sometimes there is no possible match on the whole board : not often "by default" but it still happened a few times and all it took was a few locked tiles that blocked the few possible matches I could have, and as soon as there is even a single flood curse it happens very easily (and if at some point you get 2 like me it's over almost immediately if it happens early...)
- Sometimes there is just no possible match between the enemy and my character, so I can just wait (or make "useless" matches) and prepare to die as they get closer, which is no fun either.
-> Out of 10 to 20 games I would say (I lost count because of the very short runs but it could be more), I could only pass the early game once or twice because I was very lucky on my skill choices, but on every other run I got stuck as explained before and lost very quickly even with careful skill picks because I had poor possibilities (either on the board, on the skill selection, or both).
There are 2 types of skills that are way too "vital", and necessary to survive and really enjoy the game :
- The most important ones are tile-shuffling skills and match-facilitating skills (such as wildcard), because they're the ones that can prevent you from getting stuck with no possibilities at all.
- After that, teleporting skills are very important too because they can prevent a single monster (that you sometimes don't have the possibility to kill) to hit you an infinite amount of time on the spot, also effectively ending the run.
=> In that sense I can assure you that the early game is more lucked-based and unbalanced than you think : if in the first few minutes you don't have the possibility to pick those you will die very quickly no matter how well you play, unless you are extremely lucky with the board.