Hey, thanks for playing! I wanted to have a sort of 'karma' mechanic wherein, to sort of spoil it I guess, the player can choose to forgo immediate upgrades at the little shops in lieu of helping out the other characters, which would in turn cause better rewards to be granted over the course of the game. Like a short-term minor upgrade vs long-term major upgrade sort of deal. So if you help out a lot, these other characters appear now and then to give you upgrades that were better than what you could buy. I also intended to have some show up to open short cuts and even help you out in combat, but I ran out of time. And yes, there's a definite ending with a hastily made boss fight that works, uh, most of the time. And I'm aware of the death screen thing not appearing in certain circumstances, but couldn't publish a fix before the deadline.
Needless to say, 48 hours was certainly tough!