Very cool concept. I'd wish for the following changes:
- The bandit being either completely reflex-based, but with infinite time, (each reel spinning indefinitely, and stopping ~immediately on button press) or not at all (no button press, combat is completely automatic). The way it currently is, with 2nd and 3rd reel stopping shortly after first one, automatically - maybe I am just skill-issued, but I always feel like there WOULD be right time to press the button, it's just too tedious for me, to calculate the reels in the head. And I just try to press when I see red or whichever color I stacked on the left and then hope for the best. Idk, maybe just offer all 3 styles of Bandit and let the player decide.
- The initial loadout not be randomized. Either always the same, or a few different ones to choose from ("classes")
- For deciding which symbols to pick up, perhaps I haven't understood the full depth yet, but I felt that just stacking one single color was easily the best strategy. Otherwise I would just get too many dud spins. Don't really understand the combo/multi pieces, though, do they count as any color? Anyways maybe you can come up with more ideas to enable mixing the colors, or balancing dud spins. Or maybe they already exist in the game. Was just my thoughts while playing.
My performance so far, if you care: First run died to first enemy (a dice), second run died to first boss, third run went up to 500 coins at first encounter, reached second floor, lost 60 health to a barwoman pitching drinks so I had 4 health at the 2nd boss and lost. I have no complaints. (Reading through this again, makes me think, what if there was no health, but you lost at 0 coins? Would fit the flavor very well and make for sth. different compared to all the other roguelites with coins.)
The animations and visual style I think are very cool and fitting. The unlocks are confusing to me, because why am I unlocking these things? I am barely even finding items in the game world. In the first 15 minutes I "unlock" 3 items, that have exciting descriptions, but I only find a single item to actually pick up. But this is something that I don't understand in many Roguelites, e.g. in Enter the Gungeon it makes absolutely no sense to me either. But in RoR2 I love it, because the unlocks come from doing more or less crazy things in game. There's the special satisfaction, the first 10-20 hours of playing RoR2, where you do something insane and have the beautiful popup with an item unlock. Like the game telling you, ya, that was indeed mad.
So, I am a fan of this genre and I would've bought your game on steam for 5-10€ from the pitch and screenshots. Keep trucking!!
edit: Playing a bit more, I realize I have been stupid. The 2nd and 3rd reels can never be controlled, I thought they could be if one pressed fast enough. So it's quite a bit of luck, all in all, I like that. The Multi symbols clearly have 2 different colors. That is also nice.