This will be the first month where I don't have some musings on game design while learning game design. I've been a bit focused on developing the game. For the last month I've been hard at work to expand the demo with one more stage.
The second stage will take players into eastern Siberia. For this I have coded a few new enemies, events and abilities. I am also trying to only allow enemies on each stage that would normally appear in those areas. That means that if you have already played the demo on itch or GX.games, you might be somewhat confused that the mutated Mole for example (who was one of the first enemies before) does not behave as it did before. That is because there are apparently no moles in the rain forest, so I moved those sprites to one of the new enemies of Siberia and replaced the moles with these ants:
Anyway, read the enemy tool tips and you'll be fine.
However, you can't play this version of the game yet. I still have some balancing to do and I have to code at least one boss fight for Stage 2. And I'm kinda thin on random events. Right now, on a normal playthrough you would probably start seeing some events more than once, just because the game runs out of them after a while. There is one cool new event that I'm fond of. It's of the rarer sort (it will appear in exactly one question mark tile in stage 1), but if you do find it, you will have a little side mission that you can follow through the rest of the run (or ignore it if it seems too risky). It's tentatively called the 'Quest of the Deathless'.
So I think I'll need at least another month before I can update the itch and GX.games versions of the game. I'll post about it as soon as I upload it, however.