Within a Dead City is finally out and released! Woooooooo! Thanks to everyone for their support and feedback during development.

People responded enthusiastically to the initial itch.io version and the Steam Next Fest demo. There's been a lot of work that's gone into the game since the Next Fest, and I tried to focus on making the game's strengths even stronger. Here's the major changes since the demo was released:
- Two new hero classes - the bard and the cleric. The bard can cause two monsters to fight each other (a shoutout to my days playing Ultima Online) and the cleric heals and buffs other heroes.
- Both of these new heroes have a "Support" mission where they follow another hero around and help deal with any monsters or nearby lairs.
- The game no longer starts with a ranger already trained. The player must choose which hero they train first. This should add a bit more strategy to the early game decisions. (The very first game someone plays still has a starting ranger as a sort of tutorial.)
- The wizard now has a powerful AoE spell, Fireball, once they reach the 3rd level. If they reach the 5th level (and you research the right tech), they get access to a Teleport Home spell to use in emergencies. Wizards needed a bit of a buff compared to the Ranger and Warrior, and this makes them less "glass" and more "glass cannon". Bring a cleric, lol.
- Two new game modes. Survival has you fending off waves of enemies for 15 minutes. Sandbox has zero monsters - except when you hit the buttons to spawn 'em. Play forever, if you want to.
- On that note, when you finish a game of Conquest (the OG mode) or Survival, you can continue playing in Sandbox mode.
- On that further note, Sandbox includes two extra monster spawning buttons. One summons a "Crab-pocalypse", overrunning your kingdom with terrifying giant crabs. The other summons Nidhogg the World Eater, who destroys everything he touches. I thought these would be a fun way to see just how strong your hero team is. In the past dozen hours of playtesting, I've beaten the crabs once. Yet to beat the Nidhogg.
- Difficulty is rebalanced. The game is primarily balanced for Conquest, and the Challenging difficulty level there is a challenge for me, the game dev. That's how I like it. Survival skews a little more difficult compared to its stated difficulty level, so play a few Conquest missions first before trying that one.
- Heroes now have personality! They have a chance to be Brave or Cowardly, Greedy or Content, and Cautious or Reckless. Brave vs Cowardly influences the missions they take on. A brave hero treats their level as +1 when looking at missions, so a Lvl 4 hero might take on a Lvl 5 mission, and cowards treat their level as -1 for the same purposes. A greedy hero is more influenced by gold rewards or gold loot, while a content hero is less influenced by those. A cautious hero will use healing potions and rest at home when they have more health, and a reckless hero will wait for longer before disengaging.
---- (I really like these tiny personality traits that mix up the standard hero behavior. The game is about the narratives we build about these heroes, and this adds a great little bit of flavor.)
- Another big change: research and the wizard tower have been completely revamped! Instead of building wizard towers to increase the base level of newly-trained heroes, you get the same advantage from expanding the Guild Hall. Likewise, the guard house and wizard tower buildings are gated by the Guild Hall level instead of separate research items. The wizard tower, after research, can now sell +2 rings of protection and advanced spellcasting to Lvl 5+ wizards and clerics.
- Another another big change: rare resources. These are scattered around the map. Building a trading post next to them (and researching a tech) can unlock big bonuses for your guild.
---- (I like how this opens up base building to make it something more reactive to the map rather than just rearranging a standard strategy.)
- Heroic Amnesia has been revamped as Homesickness. Instead of making all heroes forget their current mission, the spell replaces the mission with a "Go Home" mission.
- Homesickness and Summon Heroes now wipes each heroes Under Attack By list. Before, trying to save a near-dead hero by gating them back home often meant they'd charge back into the fray (across half the map, because they were still "under attack"). Now they should be able to heal, rebuy potions, etc.
-- There's a bunch of other small UI and UX improvements, as well as numerous bug fixes. Probably didn't squash them all, haha.

I hope you all enjoy the new version of the game, and I'd love to hear your feedback on it!