Patch 1

Surprise! Here's a nice content patch for Dream Warrior. I got a solid amount of feedback from the original jam release. I took most of that into consideration, but there are some new things here as well. Let's jump right into it.

• Reworked a bit of the art to be a bit more consistent. Notice especially the Inns and Merchants.
• Added a story. I suppose it had a story before, but only the vaguest outline of one. Inspired by what Jeff Vogel once wrote, you can still probably ignore it.
• Related to the above, two more endings! See if you can find all three.
• Screenshake and some animation. Since the game is mostly combat, it helps to have a bit more visual feedback, ehh?
• When items drop, it is now more clearly called out. There's less chance to miss it.
• Increased audio diversity. Not much, but some!
• New enemies with new abilities. Some may not be quite so easy for the Wizard. Two are unique mini-bosses.
• New abilities and new special weapons. Hopefully this allows different runs of the same class to play a bit differently.
• A brand new class: the Goth. Become a sad barbarian who doesn't understand homophones by drinking absinthe.
• Nerfed the monk, grudgingly. It's still one of the stronger classes, but if you want to use 2x Deathblow at the end, you have to make some preparations.
• A final, guaranteed inn or merchant stop before the bosses. Though the game is largely about endurance, leaving that entirely to (bounded) RNG felt a bit unfair.
• Despite more content, including megabytes of audio, the file size is roughly the same as the jam version! It's a long story, but the short version is that this is one of those rare HTML files that genuinely benefits from UTF-16 encoding. Browser vendors will, almost certainly, kill UTF-16 at some point, but for now it works. Well, "works" but I can't use href targets within SVG (like, you know, filters, clipping paths, gradients...) when UTF-16 encoded, and I genuinely cannot even figure out why. But that's getting away from the short version and into the long version.
• Updated the copyright string, since I guess it's 2024 now. Happy New Year!

Thanks for playing, and I hope you like the new patch! As always, I would be interested in hearing what you think. I can't promise more patches, but if there's interest then it will be much more likely.

-Robert