Decided to try and see how do-able the "In A Rush" achievement is. Took me most of the evening and a LOT of runs to complete it - it's one of those achievements where you need to actually go out achievement hunting and even then you need to be very lucky
With a proper starting item you could be less reliant on luck. At first I tried the regular "whatever the game gives me" approach, managed to beat it on the third try (because level 1 and 2 bosses were only two rooms away) and thought it was easy. Then some player complained on their Twitch stream, so I tried again and hit a wall. I did notice that some starting items help a lot, so I would just restart until I got one of those.
For the hero I pick Skeleton Ranger because he can one-shot from the very start. Bottomless Bag of Bombs is great to skip rooms, Magic Map is great not having to rely on luck to explore, but my favorite is the Rainbow Horn - allow monsters to hit you until you're barely alive and then 200+ damage makes the boss fights much shorter. Still, my success rate is maybe once is 10 runs. It's cool that it takes only 5 minutes to try.
I recorded a couple of runs, but it will take some time to upload to YouTube because my upload speed is abysmal.
If you tweak magic chest, I'd increase the gold amount given - I agree it's quite low at the moment compared to other things I could use that mana for.
I have increased it to 100. Will test to see how it feels.
So does the cushion give invulnerability to wizards only during their casting action, or for as long as the spell is in play? Seems super powerful if it's the latter.
Only during casting. The idea with cushion is to save you from situations where you have mana/rage but enemies keep stunning and you can you cannot perform the attack/buff.
Regarding summon monsters - basically I was thinking it would spawn (maybe on the other side of the room) a small number extra monsters, ideally some of the bigger/more monstrous ones (and maybe a couple of bonus ones if the art budget stretches that far). These would then fight both you and the enemies, but might give you some useful cover/distraction, especially in boss fights. It would also be a fun surprise if you tried reading it at random in forest level and suddenly accidentally summoned three yetis or whatever.
Would those monsters follow you into other rooms like guards and undead servants? This part of my code was somewhat messy, so I have avoided adding much features to it (for example, I had an idea that you can hire Bushido for 100gp/battle), but maybe I should just bite the bullet and rewrite it to allow
any unit to follow the player.