Introducing: Emergency Mode

Changelog for revision 8172

Major changes (these are discussed in detail below):

1. Added Emergency Mode.

2. Added Perimeter Shield.

3. Removed "Best Battle" and "Best Journey" leaderboards. "Best Day" is now the only leaderboard for Infestation (and it's called just "Infestation").

   For characters in the middle of an Infestation journey, the following changes take effect the next time they sleep or die.

4. Removed difficulty setting from Infestation. Battle parameters have been reworked and result in an experience similar to what you used to get at the hero difficulty setting.

5. Made sleeping remove all bonuses.

6. Made victory perks (formerly known as journey perks) in Infestation much higher (as high as they are in Doomsday).

7. Made characters dying in Infestation respawn at the last camp they slept in, losing only the camps they've captured since. Note that only sleeps initiated in the new version count. If your last sleep was with any previous version and you die, your journey just ends.

Minor changes:

• Added fog of war to the world map.

• Made captured camps no longer stay visible in subsequent journeys.

• When you hover over a character attribute at the world map menu, pending battles now indicate how much their special bonuses contribute to that attribute.

• Removed the surrender option from the battle screen. It still exists on the pause menu during a battle and is now the only option to force an Infestation journey to end prematurely.

• Made battle music in Doomsday now depend on battle rather than camp.

• Improved the character idle animation slightly.

Bugfixes:

• If your character has a non-natural skin color, entering the "Modify character" menu inadvertently changed it to a natural tone.

• Updated audio lib to Soft-OAL 1.23.1 which seems to fix some occasinal audio glitches.

• Changing the Windows default sound device (e.g. by plugging or unplugging headphones) while the game was running resulted in audio output to stop until the game was restarted.

• World map camp tooltip sometimes said "not enough wave points" for captured camps.

• Cancelling a replay download that was initiated on the main menu caused the game to crash.

• Some tooltips for skill devices were misleading as they referred to outdated mechanics.

Detailed discussion

►►► 1. Emergency Mode is finally here and it's huge! Initially, I only envisioned it as remedy for a technical issue with the leaderboards. However, the game's hiatus of over 30 months (due to RL issues, long story) gave me plenty and much needed opportunity to question and rethink a lot of game design decisions. What I eventually came up with fixes a ton of fun-killing problems all at once - but, ironically, not the leaderboard issue (see item 3).

The idea behind Emergency Mode is quite simple. During battle, your score charges an alert meter. Once you reach at least level 1, you're eligible to enable Emergency Mode from the battle screen. When you do, two things happen: you won't get any more score for the remainder of the battle, but the skills you equip in each wave provide individual, powerful bonuses. Basically, you trade some score for improved survivability.

This seemingly simple mechanic has far-reaching consequences.

• It lets you reduce the game's difficulty right when you need it. This is important because the fun in Myriavora depends a lot on hitting that sweet spot of difficulty where it's challenging but not frustratingly hard.

• The emergency bonuses are a lot of fun because they're powerful enough to turn a hopeless situation into victory. For example, all skills with cooldown period get action points as an emergency