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Thanks for playing the and the great feedback!

I'm glad gameplay is feeling better. We did a lot of work, but when I wen through to write the devlogs it was hard to really list out a lot of the changes without getting overly technical, and I didn't really have good notes to do that. I keep debating writing a more technical devlog for the game, and may do so when we get to a more polished state. We are very happy with the changes. It has been much easier to work with the new systems. We discussed the overall plan, but I did most of the work myself, so it was nice when the kids started to work with it and agreed that it felt much better to them as well.

We are planning to work on refining the combat Select Item/Target UI. With the Hungry Goes Rogue project we will be allowing players to gain non-Slime characters with different types of abilities, so that UI needs to become more dynamic, but I agree that it flows pretty well and want to keep that. We've had comments about potentially adding other characters later in the story, including the possibility of non-Slimes, so the Rogue project will open that up as a possibility for the main game as well.

We had a couple comments about the old AP amounts not being clear. Extending the panel around it was the best short term solution I had with the focus being on other aspects. I had designed it to be smaller due to space constraints when the travel progress bar was showing in combat, but with the current layout I feel that there is a bit more space and we should be able to make things bigger. I'll see about that for the next update.

I feel like status effects are a staple that the game was really lacking without. Personally, I don't really use them. I also like to focus on dealing damage and winning quickly, but I know there are people who really like to use them. In longer fights, especially boss fights, regen can be great. We also have some planned abilities for the enemies that we think will be a fun challenge.

We've been trying to work with Tanko. We really like his character design, but balancing the items for his abilities with what feels "natural" to us has been tougher. The status effect system will help, as we plan for him to get more buff related abilities. We also want to review the items and see what we can add in to make all the needed elements common enough that no one character feels like they don't get enough items.

We plan to add more to the UI to help convey the power of abilities in the future. The new combat system being simpler should help with this. The way attack abilities are currently setup to use multipliers. The base Spit has 1.0x multipliers for physical and magical. Earthshatter has a 1.2x magical multiplier, but 0 for physical. This can make basic Spit more useful on enemies with high magical/Earth defense, but weak to physical. The Elemental Strike has 0.2x for physical and 1.15x for magical, while the element specific versions are 0 physical and 1.25x for magical. We really need to add this info to the UI. We also plan to add something in combat to give the player an idea of how powerful an ability will be with a given item. We may also add an estimated damage amount for a selected enemy, but that might be tied to an ability, difficulty setting, or perhaps only showing after you have fought the enemy enough to learn their defenses.

I'll check on the Traders' Depot items showing twice. There is a way for items to show twice, but that should not be happening any more when Inventory Management is off.

We'll take a look at the boss music. That fight is meant to be much later in the game and is meant to be more intense, but maybe we can have the intensity ramp up. The music we have from Ovani comes in 3 intensities, so it would be easy enough to implement.

We really appreciate the great feedback you've regularly offered! When we redid the About UI it seemed like a good idea to not only credit the assets we used but also other devs who have helped shape the game.

Thanks again for your continued playing and feedback!