Thanks for playing! It was definitely fun to see you play, and to hear your perspective at the end, especially on some of the planned changes.
System clarity was my key failing here in my opinion. I felt bad watching you reverse engineer the numbers based on the status bars, lol. The purchases do stack, although their effects are diminished by increasing danger as the player progresses.
I originally planned for the softlocks/uncertainty in navigation to be a part of the challenge, however every one of my QA testers complained about them. I think I will lock those features behind a difficulty setting, to allow for both experiences.
With more time, I'd like to increase the complexity of the level generation, like you mentioned, to present the player with more choices. They may sacrifice time or tools, or risk getting trapped, in favor of getting more expensive loot. There are hints of that in the generation, but I think it should be explored more.
Thanks again!
Hehe, the reverse engineering was inevitable xD
I guess it's good to know that the progression is more or less in line with what was observed and predicted (and assumed in some cases, without further testing :P).
I do like the idea of the soft locks, and less favorable mapgen in general, which would start to force more resource use and clever tactics. As is it was mostly a case of brute forcing every map emphasizing the low-danger route to make decent enough progress every time. I kept expecting it to suddenly start to get noticeably harder, but... that challenge never seemed to materialize!
Good work though, enjoyable for a 7drl :)