Thank you both very much!
One thing that I found fairly counter-intuitive, however, is that your particles and hero abilities are ”reversed” on the keyboard compared to on screen, so that your hero abilities are on the top row on screen, but on the second row of the keyboard (ASDF). For me at least it has it has made it pretty hard to get a hang of the hotkeys and I still missclick a bit because of it.

This is pretty funny! I was just talking with
@StormKnight about this as he was complaining about the same issue. My rationale for doing it this way was that Q,W,E,R is the bottom row in most AoS maps and similar maps, and if there are additional abilities, they're often D or F and in the row above. So it made sense to me to have an inverted grid. But I told him that if there's another person who complains about this, I will change it, and then 30 minutes later I read your post.
Another little thing I’m missing a bit is the ability to adjust the length of the mini-games. They can sometimes feel a bit long for mini-games and at least personally I think I enjoy shorter rounds more.
Good idea! Also enable it to alter it in the opposite direction if you just wanna jam Maelstrom Madness for hours on end like you would jam Deck 16 back in the days.
Like K.V. and Ballonskipper I’m also one of the lucky few who have been testing the beta with the soon-to-be infamous AI and it works really well and is super impressive. One thing to note is that currently the difference in skill between the 5 difficulties seems to fairly modest since they’re all really tough. I played against Copper and Platinum and both kicked my ass; Platinum certainly more so, but it didn’t feel like 4 difficulties of difference, so to speak. Platinum is probably just fine as is, but it would be very welcome if the lower difficulties were made easier to please the casuals such as myself.
After spending countless hours testing against the Platinum A.I., which is basically equivalent to training under 100 times Earth's gravity, I can no longer relate to how a beginner experiences the A.I.. That's why it's great to have beta testers such as you and
@K.V. to tell me these things.
I am surprised, however, that you think that the difference between the difficulties is modest, because when I let two A.I.s play against each other, the one with the higher difficulty will dominate the lower one, even if they're just one apart. Nonetheless, I identified a few areas where their behavior is still too inhuman and made some adjustments there. Specifically, their reaction to spawning powerups was quite fast and the A.I. now takes a hefty 3 seconds on Copper difficulty to even recognize that a powerup has spawned.
During my playtests against the A.I.s, I realized that denying powerups is very important at a high skill level. The balance changes I did leading up to this version all focused on buffing all heroes except one, the Arcane Prodigy, because I felt like she was far superior to the other heroes. She is a defensive and offensive powerhouse, able to launch super-fast particles with several abilities, while the other heroes' abilities often are quite situational and hard to use. But now I realize that, at a high level, the Arcane Prodigy is just... not very good. You lack mobility and control abilities, and you just get dominated by the more mobile characters who yoink every powerup in front of you while you can't do much about it. Anyway, just some random trivia I thought might be interesting.
Thanks again for the review! Update is arriving on hiveworkshop very soon.
