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Thank you for playing and the feedback!

what programs did you use for the art?

It's mostly MagicaVoxel for all of the buildings and vehicles in the levels, along with Paint.net for drawing the rest of the art.

Also, Val's a cool character, but I gotta wonder if there's more to her than "killing is cool"!

There is, but it's difficult for me to show that with just the combat in the game right now. I wrote a bunch of different dialogue and interactions with other characters, but it's been difficult for me to get it into the game since creating cutscenes takes a long time. I also have yet to implement the rest of the actual story in the game so it'll all line up and makes sense. I really do want there to be more of a story and character element to the game on top of more ways to show the visuals and world, but it's been a major challenge to tackle honestly.

One thing I would certainly love to see in future progress logs (or maybe even as a standalone DLC when this project comes to Steam) are an artbook detailing the design process of the game, and maybe separately we could get a lore sheet to somewhat connect the dots and find out what the intel doesn't tell us about the world. 

This would be really cool to see. I'd love to show some of the design process and evolution of some of the units in the game, but it'll be some time before I can make such a book.

Some possible suggestions? (although they may not be the greatest ideas ever) Perhaps a cluster bomb or even a short-delay sticky grenade would be pretty neat. I do believe the former is possible since you would just tweak the smoke grenade to make a cluster bomb (possibly as a tertiary weapon? it would just be a single bomb that detonates into smaller explosions really)

I've considered having a grenade that splits into a small field of a dozen or so mines since people have complained that the current secondary weapon mines in the game are somewhat underwhelming. Right now I've been experimenting with air strike grenades which mark an area with smoke and have a bunch of missiles bombard it, so that probably would make cluster bombs obsolete. It's worth a shot experimenting with though, maybe it'll actually be interesting like the EMP grenades.

 Speaking of which: enemy infantry carrying MANPATs or even recoilless anti-tank rifles could be a decent challenge since they are somewhat difficult to hit and maybe they would come in transport helicopters/APCs. 

This has been suggested for a while now, but I've found that humans at the scale of the game would be roughly 3-5 pixels in size, which makes them almost impossible to see. It just doesn't work for the game's scale I'm afraid, sorry.

I would also add that with thermal smoke, enemies would probably keep shooting even if you aren't visible since it doesn't stop incoming projectiles, but breaking their line of sight is absolutely still invaluable.

I agree, and I intend to rework the smoke completely so they don't just freeze up no matter what. It's way too OP right now.

Anyway, I absolutely love this project, and I will keep tabs with great interest! I've already told a couple friends about this and decided to write this post after getting an S on every mission (took about 2 hours looking at the battle data, and maybe that just says something about me being bad at games).

Thank you kindly, and nice job S-ranking every mission! It's very impressive, especially considering how difficult Mission 7 is to avoid damage currently. I'm glad to hear it's doable though.