I played this for a few hours, I'm pretty sure I "beat" it. I unlocked the mouse and the crystal girl and all my quests were marked as complete. If there was a way to clean the slime in the gym I didn't find it.
So I love this concept, especially "essence" (size) being used as currency. A game with a similar concept that never made it to release was called GrowthRPG and that game suffered because there wasn't a way to handle the characters growing past a certain point. These growth games have a very distinct J curve with progression and opposite with difficulty. In other words, you reach a point where you start growing a lot very fast and as a result the difficulty starts to drop off at that point.
What I think GrowthRPG did wrong was not having level design progression based on size. How I THOUGHT that game worked out was that as you grow you unlock new areas that are made for bigger NPCs to live. The world is based on giants stomping around, they need a place to go too, right? I was wrong about this in GrowthRPG, the city had a way to progress to another section which had a huge boss at the end. I thought that was going to be the average size of the NPCs on that side of the city. Once you hit a certain size it becomes difficult to play the game because everything gets so tiny. If the new areas were accommodating to the new size then it would feel like you are moving forward, and if you go back to the beginning area then you can get that sense of being massive compared to when you start. If this was implemented it may fix some of the issues with getting too big for the area.
I understand the necessity for AI with this game but if the project gets funded well enough it would do a lot for the game if you could commission a 3D artist(s) to remake the characters in 3D. With 3D models you can gradually adjust things like breast size, fat, muscle, etc. The weakness of it being 2D is that you are stuck with however many drawings of a character exist, not to mention you would have a better sense of scale. You can keep the map/overworld/interiors as they are, the pixel graphics are charming.
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The rest of this is going to be about the gameplay and things that would bring me back. This will be a mix of things I liked and didn't like. I didn't take notes so bear with me....
First of all, there's ass, breasts, fat, and muscle. I would LOVE it if there was one dedicated to just size itself. Visually I don't care for how the characters start to look after a certain point, and I would have prefered the option to keep my character at about the same build but her growth was solely focused on height growth; maybe an all-around growth for people who don't want the body horror that happens after a certain point. I know some people are into that so if the size option isn't possible then maybe an option to limit how fat my character's ass gets? I liked it up to a certain point but it got to be too much. The breast characters don't seem to get it as bad as the others. I ended up picking this for most the other characters because it deformed them the least.
It's a looting game and you have to double click to sell items. I would like to see ways to make this faster by holding ALT and clicking once to sell items as well, and/or holding SHIFT to highlight items you want to sell. Add a "sell junk" option to sell common items like horns and furs etc.
The 7 day system is interesting and I like where it's going. From what I can tell it is a risk/reward system with the enemies and loot being better as the week ends. As I said already this became trivial as I got past a certain height and nothing mattered anymore.
The combat system I like. IDK what it's called if this is battlechest or something else, but it was a really fun system until I got so massive all I had to do was put it on auto and win every battle. In the early game there was strategy to it but that all eventually went out the window.
I really didn't like that low level enemies the size of my charaters' toes would go picking fights with me. By this point I just wanted to explore and see if I missed anything and getting into battle was just annoying and a waste of time for me. GrowthRPG handled this by having significantly lower level enemies just get stepped on and you get exp, or in this case essence. I would have the amount of essence gained be less for smaller enemies, by the end I was pulling 500 off of a tiny goblin.
Pierce, Stomp, Bat, and the double sword one, I'm losing the names mentally, were the best abilities and the easiest to win with. The cleanse card didn't seem worth it at all and I think adding cards that can steal hp/shield would be a welcome addition. You need healthy counters and prominent abilities that have character. Stomp, Bat, and Pierce all felt very similar to me, bit of an identity crisis with those cards.
I didn't understand the movement of enemies on the overworld. It seemed like they would randomly jump multiple squares. I felt like I had to be several squares away from an enemy to avoid combat. That may be visual lag from my inputs. Sometimes they would get a red "!" symbol and idk what that means or if it was explained.
I don't hate the crafting system but I don't like that it's the only way to get new glyphs. Instead of running around hunting for a pierce glyph (which are weirdly rare for a supposedly common card) have the vendor offer a separate buying option for glyphs and maybe a second one to gamble on getting better ones. By this I mean that the glyphs should have a rarity system from common to legendary and how good a glyph you get randomized. For example, I select what focus I want like Ass and then select the rarity, let's say I pick 3 on a scale of 5, and then when I purchase a lv3 random stomp card it is made for an Ass character and the rolls are randomized based on the rarity. A bad roll rarity 5 glyph should always be better than something like a lv3 good roll. I hope that example makes sense.
With this in mind you create more economy to spend essence on. That's probably why some of the difficulty falls off is because once you have your glyphs there's nothing to spend big "money" on. You just hoard like a dragon and go rampage. Balance this out with ways to invest your power so you can still be strong if you lose a few fights because you invested all that essence in some permanence for your characters.
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Being honest I skipped all the story bits. IDK if you are married to whatever story is going on here with the main character and the cat girl, but if you aren't then this might make a good rogue-like game. Once you beat the first area you move on to the next where the standard enemy is bigger overall. Instead of the week resetting them to lv1 the minimum would be lv5 and cap out at a higher level. As you go on you make your way to bigger areas for bigger NPCs with bigger minimal levels all leading up to a big boss at the very end. You could very loosely take inspiration in this regard from a game called "FTL: Faster Than Light" it's a pixel speceship game, but the progression across different sectors is how the game scales; enemies start having more weapons and shields the higher up you go. For this game maybe the final level is a void-theme area, or an interdenominational space, or a demon realm, or maybe those are all different level.
Your 3 biggest challenges developing this game are going to be:
-Difficulty/progression
-Balance (glyphs and power scaling)
-AI (this will kill interest for a lot of people but I understand the necessity for now)
I'll check on this project in the future but definitely advertise this on social media like Tiwtter/Blusky. Take some more screenshots and get it on the algorithms. From a quick glance this game looks like more RPG maker slop but it's actually quite good. Push that combat system, that really makes the game unique apart from the size theme.
Good luck~
*I remembered that tiles have movement points.
I also forgot to request a compass pointing back to the hub area.