Brief thoughts on ideas for part 2

Heyo! Initially I was a little stuck on how to progress with Slime Dungeon's gameplay, that is, yes we've established it's about pretty straightforward 'fire slime, use an ice or water spell to kill it'. Within that space, I've tried to make battles have a little depth to at least give certain ideal opportunities to use defend, certain items, etc. etc.

However, I do not feel I'd be doing the player sufficient justice by just holding to a rote formula of elemental enemy, use opposing element. That wears a little thin. So I was a little uninspired and puzzled as to how to best proceed, when I considered leaning onto alchemy as the focus. Specifically as it's presented in medieval 'scholarly' works, this mess of archaic ambiguous coded 'gibberish' (apparently that word descends from a prominent alchemist, whose name is westernized as 'Geber').

I think it's fascinating how alchemy was originally this sort of esoteric philosophy-religion coded as just a sort of chemistry. I believe that leaning onto that theme would allow more abstraction and provide nice puzzle excuses. Here's things I want to emphasize

Changing states. Not just Oil, Jelly, Rubber, but maybe new weird shizz. Ethereal Beth!? Metal Beth!? Who knows.
Puzzles or whatever. I'm not the best at them and people have mixed opinions of them, but I think they are good fun. Decoding texts will be a thing.

Weirder, more specific weaknesses. Probably using certain crafted items.

In fact crafting will be more important. Not sure about an actual like official crafting system just maybe more combinations of items to craft.

Tf stuff, soul/mental stuff. I would like greater synergy between the tfs and mechanics, and I think this can help. At the very least, medieval alchemy dealt heavily with the nature of the soul and mind, all that jazz, so expect more of that theme.

And yeah I apologize for being quiet as of late. As of this particular moment, I'm designing the dragon-gargoyle battle. Forgot to create the text description for Diana's ultimate :sweating: so reworking that a little. Cheers!

Edit: I've added the text and some changes to the Diana ultimate effects, full of fancy flavor text! And foreboding! It's all done on my end, you'll see it next upload!