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(+1)

I feel like this game has so much potential, and everything looks so well polished, but it's held back by trying to be too many things at once. Some games are designed around learning the rules, but a lot of the design decisions in this game seem to go against that.

With the way that the game is currently set up, I get punished for taking the time to experiment with a certain kind of enemy. If I want to figure out what the green enemy's AI is, the best way to do that is to spawn only one green enemy and see what it does. However, the game does not provide a way to do that without detriment to the rest of your run.

Your game is trying to be two things:
A) a puzzle game where the puzzle is learning the rules
B) a puzzle/strategy game where you need to cleverly apply known rules to win.

Either one of those would be fine on their own, but currently the two goals go against each other.

Ideally, you'd either make the game specifically about learning the rules (maybe by removing the whole score system and implementing a progression-based system instead, where the player physically cannot progress until they learn the rule), or provide the rules to the player, and have the puzzle be figuring out how to best apply the rules rather than having the puzzle just be learning the rules.

(+1)

Thank you for the feedback!

I think you're making a good point that I didn't realize myself! From the playtests I did it seemed that players slightly preferred learning how the enemies themselves worked - but I didn't take into account that the player doesn't really get the opportunity to experiment with how enemies work. Letting the player learn how the enemies work should feel rewarding, and although I'd like to assume it does at the moment, you are definitely right that the player shouldn't have to put themselves in a worse position to lose something - or, at least, lose something significant. In later rounds, just trying 1 enemy on a level can already be very dangerous. And, well, that's assuming that the player figures out how the enemy works in one level.

I did consider making tooltips at first, but if I were to iterate I do think I would like to still give the satisfaction of learning how an enemy works. Maybe by putting them in a situation where losing isn't as significant - maybe some alternate mode with pre-made levels and a pre-made list of enemies, where the objective is just to complete the level, and failing only resets the current level. That would be a completely different mode, though. This is good food for thought though, to say the least!

Again, thank you for the extensive feedback. This was definitely a blind spot I missed so I'm happy you could point it out for me!