We are designing this to be primarily played with mouse or touch, with controller and keyboard as a secondary option. Prior to this update we did have the keyboard/controller tooltips on by default, but with this update turned them off. You can still turn them on in the settings. We still need to update things a bit for touch lacking hover.

The tooltips are set to initially appear centered over the button, but if they appear off the screen at all they are repositioned to be fully on screen. Unfortunately, with Godot, it takes a frame for the popup's size to be calculated to see if it is off the screen. I plan to go back and rework this a bit to see if I can precalulate the size better, but for now figured we should focus on some other things first. This issue is part if why the combat tooltips are all in a single place, instead of centered over the buttons.

The affinities will be shown off more as you progress. The elemental potions and scrolls can actually be more powerful, but are rare this early. I'm planning to update the tutorial with more elemental items and having a turn discussing them to show how each Slime's affinities will affect the damage done. We're also going to add some random events to the game, including while travelling. Some will include chances for you to find and forage for the various berries that the Slimes would normally eat, so that you are not just using the equipment of the invaders. We are considering random merchants on the roads, as well as shops in the towns.

Glad you liked the boss fight. We wanted the early part of the game to be easy enough to ease people in and make sure they got to the boss fight, but also wanted there to be that bit of challenge to show what to expect as you progress. The current combat system is designed to have up to 6 enemies at a time, with the number of enemies allowed in random encounters increasing as you progress. The random enemies can be 1-2 levels below the current level, or 1 level above, with larger enemy groups being more likely to spawn with lower level enemies to balance out the larger size. We have a lot of items, but with such a short section of the game you only see a few. Prior to switching focus to the story we had 20 levels with a single final boss fight. We will look at expanding the enemy variety to help keep things feeling better at the lower levels. As you get to higher levels the range of enemy levels allows picking from up to 8 enemies which helps the random encounters feel more varied, and varies the loot better, but there are currently only 2 enemies per level, so at the start you usually only get those same 2 all the time, with a small chance of the 2 from the next level.

Thank you for playing, and the great feedback.

That's a great question. We are writing it with the idea that they can communicate, but so far the humans have been ignoring the things the Slimes are saying, so it could go either way. We may incorporate some bits later where not all humans can communicate, as we do plan for the story to take the Slimes into human towns.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

Early game the combat is pretty simple and the difference in items is minimal. The special attacks are more powerful, so saving them for tougher foes can be useful, but the current content is short enough that the final fight is the only real tough fight. Defend is not meant to be a commonly used ability, but is one of those things that is a staple ability so we added automatically, even if it may never be used by some players. The Guardian Ability is meant to be both part of defining the character of Tanko, and more likely to be used over defend if one of the Slimes is low on health and you are not going to be able heal them enough that turn. Even that is still not going to be a common ability, but in some situations can be nice to have. We will continue to work on refining the combat to try to give a greater feel of differentiating abilities and characters, though that will likely feel more prominent as the game progresses. We also plan to add a hunger/fullness system that will impact what to eat, as items are also going to gain other effects. That is still a WIP as we balance out all the ideas we have for it.

I like the idea of the fade for some of the early bits to imply travelling a greater distance without making the player endure a long sequence of nothing happening. Later you will be having random encounters more often, including non-combat events, and we just skipped some of those for the first bit to imply travelling a distance from town before running into the invaders. Having it feel further away would better fit what we wanted to portray. 

Plenty of people don't read instructions, tutorials, or even any dialog when playing games, so we do try to keep that in mind and work to make things intuitive. However, in earlier jams we had a number of comments saying that there was too much, some people felt overwhelmed, and that they'd like the first combat to have fewer characters, so we created the tutorial based on those comments, but also added an option in the settings to skip it, as well as making sure our dialog boxes can be sped up with clicking. We plan to add an in-game option to skip the tutorial when you get to it as well. We will also be revisiting the tutorial to refine it. All of the items and abilities should have tooltips on hover. The inventory screen recently had an overhaul and not everything there has tooltips, though some of that will get them in a future update when we add a tutorial for it as well, and a toggle for showing them as needed. We'll see about getting that tutorial skip option added sooner for future jams for players who like to skip tutorials, but did not check out the settings.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

Leveling up currently happens at the inns, except for the one in your home town. The story currently ends right before the inn of the town where you have the fight with the knight. We'll see about adjusting the ending to take place just after that, instead of before it, so that once you beat the knight it is clear how it currently works. We do plan to make some changes to the leveling, but for now it is just a message showing and some stat increases.

The items do have different stats, as do the Slimes. There are icons to show the affinities of the characters and the items. When they match there is a boost to the power when used. At low levels The items are fairly similar, and matching the affinities only gives a minor boost, so they don't matter as much. The fight with the knight is the first mini-boss fight where strategy with item use, and using your special abilities, can help. Since that is the end of the current content we wanted it to be a bit more of a challenge, but may have ramped it up a bit too much.  We'll see if we can make the affinities info a bit more clear in the tutorial. We also plan to add a tutorial for the inventory screen, but are still working out the best way to do that.

The UI for the inventory is a work in progress. The core is there, but we agree that it needs a bit more. We are working on refining the info displayed in the tooltips. There will be something added to give an idea of the power of an item, but we are still working on how best to format everything to not make it too cluttered.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.