Thanks for playing and the great feedback!
The only plugin we are currently using is for Git. We will be adding the SDK plugins for things like Steam, when we get to integrating them. The dialog system is custom. I've always preferred to make my own stuff when I can. It gives me more freedom to ensure it does exactly what I want.
The game started as a combat focused side-scroller, and then gained more story and RPG-like elements. As it stands it feels caught in-between them and is not working for most people. The reason we asked the questions about genres/styles is that we are planing to fork the game. The story heavy parts are intended to go more towards and RPG style with free roaming movement for exploration. We will take the current side-scroller and add some roguelite elements. We intend for both to be in a shared world, and currently, intend for them to be in the same general area, covering different events and threats in the greater conflict. This version will still have some story, but will be much more cut down.
The quests are intended to give you rewards, but they will be delivered to you by the Traders at the next town you visit. That piece has not yet been implemented. Currently, completing the initial goal unlocks the next tier of the quest. At each tier you will get more powerful rewards. Also, the demo does not go far enough for this to have an impact, but completing certain quests will have a large impact on the game. If you send items back, both for the main quest of feeding your clan, and the quests you gain at the end to supply the towns fighting back, it helps to limit how powerful the enemy can get. If you ignore the quests and keep all the loot, then the enemy grows stronger. We plan to introduce this concept to the player and give a key item, with a UI element for tracking the enemy power level.
Part of the issue right now is that the story starts off too slow. We have a lot more for the later parts that doesn't show in the demo. We may need to change the demo to start later in the game so players can see the additional elements.
The complexity of the inventory screen is for the Inventory Management mode, where you will be distributing your loot to each of the Slimes. In older versions the filters were hidden in a tab and rarely used. We wanted them to be always available for quickly managing the items when distributing them ans the filters are very helpful for that part. With the recent change to disable Inventory Management by default, the inventory screen is a bit bloated and not well designed for the simpler gameplay. The last update hid the Slimes' individual bags, making the shared party bag much bigger than it needs to be, but removed potential confusion for people of why they would need to use the individual bags. We need to take a look at the UI changes to make this mode feel more natural.
We will look into the UI scaling issues. We believe in letting players play how they want, so don't want to force anything on them. We have support for fullscreen in the game itself, and through Itch adding a button for it, and would rather leave that choice up to the player. During jams I often don't play in fullscreen as I take notes while playing and not all fullscreen games like constant switching of focus. Still, players should be able to play in a window and still read everything, so we will see if we can improve readability at smaller sizes.