Ladies and Gentlemen, and gentle ladies and men, I hereby announce yet another update. Here is its contents:

Levels:

• Mafia Boss Room

Combat Characters:

• Banaknight

• Starfish

• Eyemafish

• Sewastronaut

• Phantasma

• Rattio

• Cowch

• Spooklet

• Lunatrick

• Phantom Conjurer

• Geometrytodefeatme

Exploration Encounters:

• Rattio

• Duckstrange

Exploration Scenery:

• Twisted Peaks

• Someplace

• Sea Tower

Meals:

• Banana

Tiles:

• Banana

• Banana (green/under-ripe)

• Banana (brown/ripe)

• Triangle

• Pitchfork

Changes:

• Unlock playable characters by defeating them! Click on the campfire to start.

• Tiles have their own turn counter now, utilised for certain mechanics, such as decaying bananas

• Turn Counter has improved visual feedback

• Mousing over characters brings them to the front

• New trailer by the way!

• Changed some enemy behaviours

• Fixed a bug where characters did not play their idle animation at the start of combat

This update brings progression! You can unlock certain enemies as playable characters by defeating them. I had some people playtest the game and noticed some things so I improved the turn counter and mousing over characters shows them fully. Some enemies I felt weren't too fun to fight so I changed them, especially the Knight Rat, which summoned another Knight Rat after taking damage. There's now a boss for the Forager's Red Rodent Rescue story, although it doesn't make sense yet. There's now a new trailer featuring music by Huw Roberts! A huge improvement for the Steam page. As always there are some new characters, which brings the total to 195!

I hoped to do more but it's been a couple of months since an update and I felt the need to post what I've got so far, just to keep momentum. Sorry if it's slow! To finish this game, I plan to include more progression systems, bosses for every story, and at minimum have those stories make sense. The Red Castle is at that stage, and others are close. Then there is always the challenge of balancing the game with so many moving parts. I want Rat Mode to be less random and feel more like a game. For the roguelite aspect to work there needs to be more build opportunities with items, tiles, upgrades, charms and meals. Hopefully I can do it!

As always you can contact me by joining my DIscord[discord.com] to give suggestions or to follow my WIP progress with Idylls and other random projects.