Heh, i see what you did there 😉

The Grabbles have arrived

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I'll explain most of it away by saying that the world map now is on a lower priority and very incomplete while I concentrate on more of the tower dungeon gameplay. The December demo is meant to not even include the world map menu until I do more work on it.
It is briefly mentioned in the tutorial, and this is temporary, but you can press F2 to make time pass on the world map.

The current idea for the world map in a more final form is something you sprawl out on with different production-chained buildings and roads searching for points of interest and resource nodes. These give you what you need to put into making/buying items, completing story objectives, or contributing to the separate stat upgrade screen I'm adding later. I also have more ideas for other interactions involving the turns that pass on the map and different entities that can travel around or be found in towers. But that will be revealed later!
The world map content is at like 5% right now. If even that.

To build with controller, you must switch to the build tab, make sure the cursor is locked to the building selection menu (default is toggle with B), select a building, then scroll to a place with grass and hold down the build button. Control guides on the bottom should get you all you need.

I'm planning a "safe entrance" feature for spawning in too!

For weapon mechanics, they're somewhat deep, enough so that I'd like to have an entire tutorial dedicated just to them later.
At the moment, players start with a weak "fusion potency bonus" stat, which is the main way one gains power through fusion.
The intention is for that stat, plus the "fast-drain threshold" for being able to use more powerful items longer, will enable you to "fuse-up" to higher heights as you progress.
Buuut at the moment, the upgrades are tied to the building blueprints which I will be removing or reworking eventually.
I'd rather have it so that you can just assign points that you earn by building/doing enough stuff (with some other gimmicks I have planned).

Fusing is meant to be -risky- if done in combat, but can be done with finesse.
Enemies don't always know where you are, however they can be alerted to your presence by enemies with third eyes, and they can remember the spot they last saw you, and will try to follow up. It is possible to escape to a safe spot for a time in most cases. It's valuable to know this is on player's minds though. As for the third-eye enemy, I'm planning on reworking that one because it IS annoying.

I definitely recommend rebinding the controls to what's comfortable to you, I've set it to what I'm used to, but I know the middle click isn't great on all mice. I put it on middle click since I find I only have to use it shortly for fusing or activating objects, freeing right click for comfortable shooting.

The quick dungeon mode is just a dev-mode feature that puts you directly into a dungeon on a fresh save, but only makes a temporary file for it that is overwritten next time you quick dungeon. Otherwise, it is identical to the normal mode.

I am planning a full campaign story with cutscenes and hand-made levels. The cutscene engine is already mostly done actually, was one of the earlier features I added. It just needs some more animation features and portraits. Buuut that's far far off. There are still a few systems I need to prop up first before that can start.
Another huge aspect I haven't even started with yet is NPCs and new mission types other than "kill all guys", which will add a lot more needed texture and character to the gameplay.

I've never encountered the game flickering like you describe before, you'll have to let me know if you can reproduce it.

Definitely going to check this out!

I would be happy to try it

Tried it out, and there's a few things I noticed.
While playing around with the configs, F1 would restart the game. I'm assuming it's a debug feature for the test build.
While adjusting controls in the Keyboard Config Menu, I noticed that it detects some keyboard buttons incorrectly. Examples I noticed were /*-+ on the numpad, \, the Windows Key, and the Context Menu Key. The non-numpad plus and minus, NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock, Pause/Break, and both Alt keys would result in a blank entry as the bound key. Lastly, trying to bind something to F5 caused a crash.

Gameplay wise, I've only got a few things to comment on. One, like Barnem mentioned, is that when starting on a floor, you can end up in a very crowded area with little time to react. It's not like you get taken out in one hit, but it does seem a bit odd to spawn surrounded by enemies.
The other comments are regarding the world map. Nothing too bad, just a QoL suggestion of adding an icon along the bottom to remind players that F2 will progress time. That would be pretty helpful. The other is that the blueprint system isn't really explained much, though it may still be in the works. With that in mind, I do recall the flavor text for a blueprint appearing in a tower was stuck aligned to the bottom of the screen, cutting off a couple lines of text. Not sure what caused it, as I only saw it happen once.

All in all, the game as a whole is coming along great! It was fun to finally get to play a test build of it!
On a side note, I can't quite explain it, but Morris makes me think of a fusion of Gravity Falls' Dipper Pines and Craig from your old Foxhole comic, turned into a mouse. Weird.

Thanks for the feedback!

Most of the world map's foibles will be from its unfinished state. I'm planning to outright remove blueprints before reworking and resizing all the world tile graphics. The building mechanics will involve rescuing rats and getting loot from towers to help you start production chain buildings (think like a simpler Factorio) that produce things over time(turns) that allow you to purchase increasingly complex items or buildings and upgrades later. An ouroboros of pleasant set-and-forget progression systems, I'm hoping.

In the most broad sense, I want the world map to be a sort of "canvas" that represents how much you've accomplished via your alterations to the landscape. I want there to be a certain satisfaction in looking down at your work as it moves and breathes, knowing you've earned the sprawl and splendor. Buuut that'll take some work on my part.

As for the controls, my keybinding system is done very "manually" by my own code. Simply, those keys just aren't accounted for in my custom system under the assumption they're unlikely to be used. I'll look into what I can do to make those unaccounted keys "cancel out" or include a few more that might be needed.

So, a big thing I want to do later is have bespoke "objectives" for each floor, handled by some sort of controller. Right now, the equivalent would be just having "Eliminate all foes".
These objectives, as I add more, will be a bit more "directed" with phases. Among those is an intro phase that lets you breathe before activating the challenge or enemy spawns yourself. Enemy spawns will be controlled based on phases, rather than just being littered randomly at stage start. I have seen this particular critique a lot, so I definitely have my eye set on ways to alleviate the feeling of being thrown in like that.

Oh, and indeed DEV mode is active, allowing extra cheats and buttons to allow manipulating the game. Secret cheat: I believe if you press numpad * while the world map is up, it'll save a printout of the surrounding world gen as an image in the working folder where saves are. SHIFT+numpad+/- zooms the magnification level of the tile sampler in the world map.

Hope I didn't miss anything! I got a couple things written down, so I greatly appreciate the help!!!

I posted the link to my socials, best of luck!

That is VERY appreciated!!

Any chance the code is available on Github? I'd be interested in taking a closer look. :)

I never did learn git. Just have manual end-of-day backups, local and cloud.

Neither did I, the CLI version, at least. I use GitKraken (a GUI add-on to Git) personally. I'm told Github Desktop is an ok alternative as well.

Finally got around to trying it out and I think I played this build for at least 5 hours straight. Very neat aesthetically and mechanically. Because it's so unique I'm not sure the direction you intend for this game to go in terms of polish, balancing, features and content to be added.

Definitely have some more in depth feedback and critiques I could give if here's a good place to share them, otherwise let me know if another platform or method works better.

I also recorded the majority of my play session, from inexperienced beginnings to game breaking plays and exploits that would result in lagging the game below 1 frame per second from excessive entity spawning, without using cheats (I believe?).

Impressive, I'll hand you my email

Sounds good. Feel free to send it via note or something