Balancing & Graphics update

Since the campaign "The Lair" (which is like the game's arcade mode) was added as kind of an afterthought to be there before I finish writing the other campaign "The Eye of Souls" with an actual story, the one quest of "The Lair" was largely imbalanced. So my main focus for this update was to make sure this quest can be played with actually having a realistic chance to finish it, while hopefully not making it too easy for more experienced players. For this, I introduced an initial starting capital for this quest, which is randomly rolled when starting the quest. It's not super-much but you should be able to buy some essentials at the merchant and take them along on the quest. This especially is designed to provide you with some help in the beginning. Once you reach a certain level (around 3), it is likely  to no longer provide much of a benefit (depending on what you were able to buy). But by then, the items dropped by mobs should have provided better alternatives. 

In addition to equipment and chance to access it, I updated the way enemies are spawned. Whereas before all enemies would be spawned directly at the start of each level, it turned out that this would cause situations where the runner is swamped with enemies and can have very little chance of survival. So now instead, only a limited number of enemies are spawned at the beginning of the level and every time an enemy is killed, there is a 30% chance or spawning a random other enemy from that level (except for rare ones, such as level bosses). I had first tried to see how this looks like if it would always spawn between 0 and 2 enemies but that quickly escalated into the runner being flooded with enemies when they started killing them.

Another update I did was to the graphics. I didn't really like the display of player and non-player characters and that being inconsistent with the look of dropped items and such (which were still in their original ASCII glory). So for the Browser and SDL versions of the game, for inside the actual game world (not the UI), I updated the graphics to be more appealing (I think anyways). So the characters are now actually portraying what they are and same goes for equipment, objects on the ground as well as walls and floors. In SDL and Browser mode, we now also can see any objects that are on top of other objects. So, for example if you drop an item to the ground, you can still see that there is ground behind it. Obviously, as this is an ASCII-based game, reverting back to the original ASCII mode is now possible through the options menu too. 

Some usability issues were also addressed. So to some users it might have been quite unclear what they are supposed to do on the roster screen. I updated some labels there to make it a little more obvious. Also unnecessary steps such as selecting the quest in a campaign if there is only one quest, or when all characters in the roster end up dead, having to navigate all the way back to the main menu to restart the game  are now no longer necessary either. 

I hope you enjoy this update as much as I did creating it. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for playing!

AndCake