I think the game would be more interesting if there were more choices for how to progress. Like several monsters at the same difficulty tier which give different stats. Currently it's fairly linear and the only choices are figuring out the few places where you skip ahead.
The lower tier tools do catch up as you get to the later paintings. I'm working on sweets now and my best tool is almost always the one for the color pixel I'm on. Even the feather.
No, Nefron is correct. The regular +5% speed to feather (or whatever) works fine. But the global +5% speed to all tools gives only a small fraction of that. The dev probably has an extra zero in his formula.
5% cost reduction is too little to be worth anything at all. Each team you buy a tool it increases in cost by about 13%. I currently have level 274 feather and 9 levels of the cost reduction upgrade. Those 9 levels at 5% each are only getting me about 3 extra purchases of the tool level, so less than 1% increase in feather dye production. Totally worthless in all situations. A better upgrade would be a decrease in the cost increase per level. i.e. 13% increase goes to 12%, etc. That would yield real benefits.
The pacing on the game is strange. Once you finish the first 10 paintings your progress shoots up very quickly. It would be better to smooth that out, like by making paintings #8-10 a little easier.
maybe I'm colorblind, but that it definitely light blue. Anyway, an idea for the dev to make the lower level tools more interesting: maybe instead of blue only covering "blue", it could cover anything that includes blue. So cyan, purple, green, etc. That would make the lower tier tools have more lasting value.
The upgrade says double dye per tick if the pixel is blue. There is a light blue and a dark blue. As far as I can tell, only dark blue counts as "blue". This seems like a poor decision in a game about art... or maybe I'm just not seeing this correctly.
This looks like it might end up being a good game, but there is currently only about 10 mins of content. It would have been better to build out the content more before releasing it. I'll check back to see if there are updates.
To follow up on my prior post: only certain stuff boosts the strength of certain mobs. Arrow towers boost archer mobs, etc. As far as I can tell, the correct strategy is just to build factories and mobs for a long time until you can afford lightning or lasers and then build those and then you just sit there bored while you kill everything forever.
The mobs scale in damage based on what you build. If you just build walls and factories and a couple research labs you will survive far longer than if you build weapons everywhere. I went 16 levels with no damage at all and had built up walls all around the map. Then I spammed weapons everywhere thinking this would make me even better - instead it made the enemy damage go from less than 1 to over 2600. They one-hit all my buildings and I was dead. Stupid design.
You get access to better homes as you upgrade your wizard. There are different upgrade paths with different requirements, so check the wiki if you want the unlock conditions. Generally you'll need to be sure you use some space on treasure chests so you can afford the next home when it comes available.
 "Absorber"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Arzath Revenge"){kind=icon}
 "Aspiring artist 2"){kind=icon}
 "Void Defense"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Cosmos"){kind=icon}
 "YORG.io 3"){kind=icon}
 "Theory of Magic"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Pins"){kind=icon}