Upcoming exploration rework (Patreon)

Next release should be out at the start of next week once we finish new character sprite (Yris) and whole exploration rework still ongoing. Most troublesome parts are already finished (new GUI parts and mechanics for item usage/capturee interactions). 

I've already mentioned some of the new mechanics, so this time I wanna superficially go through what else gonna change. 

Firstly, areas are restructured: its not a hub anymore, instead all areas are linked so you can walk (and will have to) from one town to another (except for Umbra for obvious reasons). From towns you can return to mansion for a small price with all capturees and items. I might slightly alter this later, so for example with bad reputation this option won't be allowed.

Now, for a long time I had a specific problem regarding exploration: to make game areas more strict regarding their loot and quality of captured slaves. But on the other side I hesitated to create many small areas which would be very similar but feature mildly different races. They would also be quite painful to explore without a map, but I'm not ready to attempt making code for it. For now we are using system with quite few areas but fairly huge number of encounters per area (at least in some cases). Trying to solve it, I've went through many different ideas, such as making a pool for random encounters you could choose what you like or even randomly generating new  areas such as race specific villages. 

None of that seemed like a good combination of easy presentation and fun to play. However, I came up with a new mechanic idea: Deeper Areas. After you've walked through the location, you can now access [Deeper Area] of this location. I have a bit of hard time to grasping the idea of it with the name, so bear with me here. The thoughts behind it were how you would move deeper into the forest (cave or whatever) to encounter previously unexplored parts. It's a bit awkward for populated territories, but still makes some sense in my opinion. 

Deeper areas are functionally same as their normal counterparts, but generally harder. You will encounter more enemies and they gonna have higher health and power. They also will have higher awareness, so overall Deeper areas are harder versions of existing areas. However, you will get more exp, more loot, and NPCs found there will have a chance to be of higher grade. Deeper areas might have new, harder encounters and areas not common for normal version. I especially like this approach due to how world stays familiar and memorizable, but expands in itself. Previously it was hard to imagine how to feature same race with all possible grades in just few areas (slave human, common human and noble human do not thematically fit together, and making new areas just to present higher grades means that after some time player will have no reason to return to easier area). Obviously, Deeper areas can also be utilized for other purposes like new encounters, areas to unlock and treasures to find. 

Oh yeah, in case you have been wondering, I do plan to add some sort of equipment enchantment system (as randomly generated bonuses at least), but due to amount of work this will have to happen a bit later.

Thank you for your attention and patience.