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Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate the feedback. And I'm glad you enjoyed the parts you did!

A bit about the issues you had:

You might be right about the tutorial. It's hard to judge for me how  difficult that is, knowing everything in advance. I noted down in my giant list of things to do to include little videos for basic mechanics at the start and i will most likely do that in the next update, especially if I hear about the same issue from other people too.

A long-term goal or purpose – this part is of course unfinished, this being a demo. My hope it that unlocking new weird areas, finding hidden side areas( there are a few small ones already that have a chance to appear in the caves) and the collection aspect would be that main goal. There's only one main area for now of course, but that will change soon and I have a thing planned where hard to catch monsters will be required to unlock story with unique artwork. We'll see how that goes. Possibly a couple caves will be available immediately, but require some monsters instead of a key, so you could unlock stuff at your own pace. I think that would be cool.

A more intuitive upgrade system. Did the upgrade menu itself seem intuitive enough? This whole situation is hard to figure out, so some changes might be coming, not sure to be honest. In terms of monsters my hope was to incentivize capturing various monsters, checking what sort of tags they have for possible upgrades and capturing others for collection purposes in the meanwhile . The collection towers in the Testing Fields also mark which monsters belong to evolution lines( all in the same evolution line have similar uses) and so on. I'm hoping to make a larger amount of the monsters captured more useful later. I will be adding more various upgrades so a player could possibly notice that he already has a monster he can use for a new upgrade, for example. There's a lot to figure out in this whole area basically.

Infinibucks. At the beginning they are not too useful, but they have a use in the Monster Synthesizer at the bottom of the first cave( there will be others). They also are needed if you want to change up the upgrades that use mod points. Not sure you unlocked these, but after finishing the cave( activating the Monster Synthesizer for the first time), you gain access to two monster nests with their own Evolver devices for a chance to capture some higher tier monsters and those require Infinibucks. There will probably be more things. Not trying to justify myself, just mentioning that this currency is kinda slow burn thing.

Sorry for the long reply( I stopped myself actually, I could rant about this thing for a whiiiile, haha) and definitely let me know if you have other things you noticed. You don't sound overly critical to me at all and thanks again.