Suggestions for the game

[MadamBork]

Helloo, hopefully you see this NoEyeSoft! First all, love your game, it's fantastic. I'm trying to recommend it to all my friends lol
Anyway, there are some things I'd love to see implemented in this game:

-**Better organized items page**
Once you're in section three, or even section two, you have a ton of items, and since they're all ordered by how recently you got them it can get pretty messy and it's hard to see what you have. This for me can make it difficult to strategize if I should aim to get more upgrades for Root (who I main) or if I should get more healing items for the end-of-area bosses because I just can't really tell what I have because of how many cigarettes I have in between everything. I would love if you could make it so each item has a "x[number of items]" at the end of the name so I can more easily see what I have plenty of and what I need to restock on. For example, if I have two ammo, the items tab would display "ammo x2", so the ammo would stack on top of the first ammo you receive. This would be an amazing ease of access feature and would make the items menu feel less like a cluttered bag that you're just feeling around for a certain item and more like an, well, items menu.

-**Revamp Luna**
Luna is a fun character to use to grind shards since you keep your upgrades when you die, but at the cost of skin percentage. This is a great concept and all, but besides that Luna feels a bit out of place in terms of game mechanics. Now, do take this with a grain of salt since I am a Root main and don't really use any of the other characters, but I just don't like how you keep all your upgrades and items when you die since it basically guarantees a victory every run (unless if you die to the enemy in negative skin percentages), even if you die a few times. For Root's gimmick you need to strategize a little bit for when to risk being in a couple of fights with low health in return for upgrading the gun early, which I like, but Luna you just...pretty much just brute force the game. I think a way to help balance Luna is if you die, one of your stats/weapons are reset to the default.

-**Revamp/Expand on Noire**
Again, take this with a grain of salt, but I just don't see a point of playing as Noire when you have Root or Luna to choose from. I know she's a starting character and I agree that she shouldn't have a special gimmick, but "late game" (just when you unlock stuff) there isn't a point in using her. Perhaps you could implement something in the moon shard upgrade menu that you could purchase that will give Noire something unique, but make it expensive so you still have to grind a bit before you can unlock that special ability.

-**Character-Specific Moon Shards**
I just thought of this while writing the previous one. To encourage the players to play as other characters (and I'm sure this will be a bigger issue once more characters are added to the game, which I'm also guessing will happen) and encourage players to learn how to master the mechanics of the other characters, perhaps add character-specific moon shard currencies that can purchase certain upgrades in the moon shard upgrade menu. This might work well with my upgrade for revamping Noire, since you could create that upgrade for Noire that you can only purchase only after playing Noire a lot.

-**Hard Mode and Challenges/Modifiers**
I personally find the game quite easy since I've been playing it for a while, so I think it'd be nice to have an option like the "A Cry For Help" upgrade that will provide the player with a harder difficulty option before each run. Maybe also add a challenge menu in the main menu or after you select a difficulty for a new run that will hold many extra challenges that reward the player with more moon shards, maybe certain character-specific moon shards if the challenge requires the use of a certain character, or maybe even unique characters that cannot be unlocked by beating a certain boss, or unique recollections. These challenges could be something like "complete a run without using healing items" which would just replace healing items in loot pools with crimson shards or maybe a different random item, or "complete a run using only items to deal damage" or really anything. I'm sure you'd be able to come up with a ton of different modifiers that will help improve the replayability of the game!

-**Revamp Unexpected Events**
These are fun little spooks that help contribute to the horror aspect of the game, even after you've memorized all the enemies since it does catch you off-guard; it has startled me plenty of times in the past. The issue is one of these happening wastes a potential move you can make before fighting the end-of-area boss, and it can be more annoying than contributing to the horror atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE this idea, but it could at least contribute more to the player's current run that just giving them a little scare. At the very least make it so it doesn't progress you through the run. Also, I feel like many of the Unexpected Events from version 0.5.X aren't present in 0.6.X, and the pool of Unexpected Events in 0.6.X feel rather limited. I would like to see more events from earlier versions added to 0.6.X, as well as some new ones, maybe even some character-specific or room-specific ones as well! Also, I do really like the ones that at first feel like nothing happened at first (on a couple occasions I got the "Crimson Dancers offer death" event when I chose a room where the priestesses were a possible event, and it *really* got me good!), but then it's something pretty horrifying. I always thought a good one might be tricking the player into thinking they got the event where they just obtain the item, but when it says what they obtained, it would just be something terrible, something would pop on-screen, and then the normal bits of Unexpected Events would happen after. Maybe it would be a severed head or something, the text freezes so the player doesn't accidentally skip over it, a little jumpscare, then straight to gray with the normal Unexpected Events text.

Well, that's all for now! I'll definitely end up adding more to this list later. I hope you see this and consider implementing my suggestions! I wish you luck with the development of the game <3

[MadamBork]

Also, by Priestesses of the Moon, I mean the Crimson Dancers, I just forgot their name-

[NoEye-Soft]

Thank you for the detailed suggestions! I can't spoil anything, but since I'm currently developing the 1.0 release, a lot of the things you pointed out are already fixed for the final game (e.g. making it clearer that Luna is a kind of "cheat mode" and an overall more challenging experience). As for everything that hasn’t been fixed yet, I'll keep your feedback in mind!