Updates

After gathering some feedback I have made the following changes:

• There is now a small chance that you can encounter a friendly NPC that will either heal you or give you gold. This will be influenced by the direction you have travelled in.
• To make the shield seem more useful I have changed the special item system to require you to block with your shield before you use it.  
  
• I have also changed the special item system so that you only use X instead of Z+X to use special items. This addresses the issue of some people finding it difficult to press Z+X at the same time without accidentally attacking or blocking. 
• In the shop, you now have to navigate to the exit using the arrow keys instead of pressing X to leave.
• I have also fixed a bug where you could over-heal by purchasing more lives than you had max hp.

Known Issues

Special items such as 'Run' and 'Bomb' seem to cause the 'you have blocked' text to stay up until the next encounter as the player needs to wait until the next encounter for their turn to properly end.

Future Improvements

In the future, I would like to make the combat less luck based. Originally I had planned to give each enemy an attack pattern and so I might try to implement that in the future. 

New music would also be nice to add as the current song isn't great and it gets repetitive fast.