Hey, thanks for playing. So far only one enemy has been given a look, and in the end they're all going to be proper monsters of some kind.
Yeah, I need to add save points, or warp points in the dungeon for sure. I don't know when that will happen in the future, but it will eventually.
I have a couple of different goals that probably aren't very clear in the game's current form, as I'm working on various other systems instead of making those goals crystal clear. The reason the over world is so large is actually just because I want exploration to be a major focus of the game. The dungeon turned out as large as it did so I could satisfactorily explore several things with the water pipes mechanic. Ideally also, combat will change to reflect faster enemy speeds as the game progresses. Enemies will get faster and more aggressive, and hopefully late game combat will look a bit more like Devil May Cry, or other character action games. Although it's kind of there in the current game, I'm still figuring out ways to include the survival elements I want, but I'm imagining things like requiring certain types of gear for certain climates and making your loadout something to think about for the entirety of your over world traversal. In the final game more dangerous enemies will appear at night as well, adding time pressure to over world travel.
For a while, you could change gear by accessing a chest, and only with this demo did I experiment with sleeping in the tent being where you could change gear, since I thought of it as a sort of daily preparation. For DD 51 it'll be back to accessing a chest to change gear. Unfortunately, my experiment with putting weapons out in the over world was pretty short sighted, and as you express, it's annoying to find something you can't just equip. I don't know if I'll have a more logical system by DD 51 (such as smithing weapons) but it should at least be less annoying then.
Dang I'm not sure what I'm envisioning for the game will live up to those expectations! Although I enjoy my sort of cheeky "tourist stuck in a troical hell hole" flavor, the game likely won't lean that into modern Hawaiian life. The island itself (although the map is currently just Maui) is a lost Hawaiian island hidden away by magic hundreds of years ago, so you won't see many modern things on it, other than stuff that washes up on shore somehow. The plan is also for the camp sites to be things the player builds themself, even if it's just a quick cut scene when a suitable spot is found. Hopefully you'll like the game anyway.