Rejected Draft

Been stuck after the first masterpiece for days now. I once hit e216 quintessence, but something changed with either Stippling Hawking's ink reward or feat medals to where I can't hit e80 ink anymore, putting me around e212q. I can't make enough wax to buy more medals, and all masterpieces after Vitruvian Man seem impossible with my current stats. Is there a strategy to the masterpieces I'm missing, or does it genuinely take days of attempts for the right luck? Is my feat medal base supposed to be x1.072 (not 1.1something)?
Loved the game up until this point, ditto to what the other comments said. The strategic elements for the opus fights and selectively using guarantees was interesting. None of that's seeming to work now, though.

I think I've hit a wall that I can't move past because of acrylic generation. I need to kill three Opus portraits to get an upgrade, and the combat is just impossible with purple. No idea what to do.

can anyone give me a hint how to beat old guitarist through its high counter chance? or is it not supposed to be beaten in this patch? I beat all other sketches at least once, currently at e233 slowly waiting

Since the most recent update, the game no longer seems to play in the background while in another tab or window, meaning in order to make any progress I have to just sit and stare at the screen. With a game that takes this much time and moves this slowly, that's unbearable. I'm really hoping this is a bug or a setting I can change. It was fine until I updated yesterday.

I've been having fun with the game, but the progress is so slow, even for an idle game. While I like power-ups, there are so many I can't keep track of them, and some are so similar it doesn't seem necessary. I'd rather half the skills (at least) get scraped and all income and rewards get multiplied by 20 so I feel like I'm getting somewhere. Also... it really bothers me the Melted Candle doesn't provide wax when defeated.

Really reminds me of Absorber and I like the mechanics I've seen so far. I would very very strongly consider excising any AI assets ASAP because it's truly unfortunate you're including any and having that AI disclosure on Steam is not going to do you any favors and is personally stopping me from recommending the game. Put aside a couple hours to make some programmer art, get art from your discord buds, ask a younger family member to make some crayon drawings, literally anything is better than using AI.

this game reminds me of Absorber, very similar but i like the different features

Honestly I really enjoy this. I'm not a huge fan of AI assets but the graphics are so inconsequential here that I can almost forgive it. All the same, to echo others, even bad sketches by real humans would be better. But I am enjoying, and hoping it unfolds as deeply as it appears. Progress is a bit slow in some areas, but I do feel a constant progression nonetheless. Happy to sink my teeth into this and look forward to future updates, thanks!

I want to like this game, but the growth rate feels rather unbalanced.
Redraw stat buffs exist, but they don't feel overly impactful even when I've dumped in 10 million points over various stats.
Initially the growth from killing stuff feels fitting for the enemy's stats, but later on it's just... I'm not sure what the word for it is, so I'll go with [scuffed]. It feels very uneven.
The enemy rarity thing initially seems interesting, but then you find out that previously discovered ones also just disappear on the next reset. So you might've just had a great reset with plenty of bonuses and allowing you to go a couple of steps further, followed by a reset without anything extra and making you feel handicapped.
Rather than the extras feeling like a reward, the lack of them feels like a punishment to me. That's not even mentioning several of the prestige upgrades being locked behind you beating a certain number of these rare spawns, so if you're somehow comically unlucky you're going to be doing a lot of resets.
The passive resource gain so far also feels rather underwhelming. I see some upgrades later on that seem to promise finally getting more than 0.1/s, but they are well outside of my reach for the foreseeable future.

As the other commentors pointed out, the foundations for a great game are here, but the rate of progress from redraws is absolutely awful. Spending tons of clicks/quintessence and feeling like you barely notice a difference next run is just bad game design.