First off, thanks a ton for playing this and giving such great feedback again Irin. I always appreciate the detail you go into :)
I definitely agree the game would benefit from a tutorial section. I’ll likely add that you should look for some white flowers to make said potions. I was hoping since so little is in the game currently, it would be easily found out with some experimentation but I can see it being frustrating.
(You should be able to escape from every battle in the game by hitting “cancel” when first entering a fight then selecting “escape”).
I agree it’s odd you can kinda scoop up late game resources essentially for free, I may make this a bit harder to do with monsters that chase or block off paths but I kinda like that if you just let em be, you can explore anywhere really so I haven’t decided the best way yet (potentially granting the recipes that use them when a certain monster is killed on each tier for example).
RNG and misses in general definitely suck especially when it’s a 1v1 fight, I’ll likely further tune evasion / hit rate and make player buffs last 5 turns to mitigate that potential to waste turns and resources.
A consistent attack pattern is definitely something I’m thinking through, it just didn’t make the build in the time I gave myself for it. Still thinking through how complex it should be.
I had actually devoted about a quarter of my total time to playtesting but the next time I do a challenge like this, I may do an even small scoped idea and just test more.
Thanks for slogging through, did you manage to make any armor or beat any further monster?