Thanks for playing and the feedback. We do have a story behind the game, and personalities for each Slime. They also will have more differentiated stats as of the next update. We tried to give a tease in the intro, but know it wasn't much. We are planning to take part in another improve your game Jam at the end of the month, with our focus for that one being to add new systems to better handle scripted events and incorporate more of the story. We wanted to get more of the core mechanics in place before we added the story so the script handling systems would better mesh.
I overdid the combat system for the initial release and so we ended up not showing as much of the item stats as had been planned. We are working to optimize things now so we can show more details without it being too much on the screen. We will be iterating on the UI as we work out how best to show enough info, without it becoming too text heavy. The current popup details will be getting icons or short text to show the highlights of an item or enemy. We also plan to add some achievement/collection screens where you can see more details on the items you've collected and enemies you've faced.
The art is also going to get a complete overhaul, but that is an ongoing project with no set deadline. Art is an area that has always been a weak spot for us and we are still learning, so it takes longer to do than much of the other parts of game dev for us. Considering the amount of items and characters in this game, its going to take a while. With the art update we are working to make things more clearly different, and to add more animations and effects.
In its current state the game is overly easy. We haven't done a proper re-balance since adding the inventory, and that gives the player a significant advantage. In the original jam version you had to rely entirely on luck for what items were in your belts, so we had the enemies balanced for that. The special abilities are also a recent addition. We'd hoped to finish the new combat updates and do a balance pass before the submissions closed, but it still needs more work.