I spent 6 hours testing the balance of the starting squad, lawl.

At first I wanted just the lone Master looking for students. But Martial Arts, at low levels, is not only weak in general - it is ESPECIALLY bad when you're badly outnumbered. So I kept gradually boosting the old guy's stats.... but it soon started to creep up to OP pretty fast, and I wanted this to be a start where you could have plenty of room to progress normally, not be one of the many godstarts. There are plenty of those already. The idea for an old, retired Master being convinced to come out into the world again let me keep his stats sane without being OP.

So first I added just one student, then two. Still needed far higher stats than I think makes a good start. Ultimately ended up with the current four, with stats that provide you a head-start but still won't let you, say, 4-man the Dust King Tower or anything like that. And then having a squad of 4 - one old retired former Master and three oddball students - gave the opportunity to create custom characters.

Testing was deemed complete for initial release when I could take on a squad of Hungry Bandits and win, but still get pretty banged up in the process. Dust Bandits are still out of reach for the starting player. The hope is that the player has maybe some more options to get into action sooner and spend less time mining that same ol' copper node endlessly.

After I had a squad of four custom uniques, I realized... they needed their own dialogue. So another hour or two was spent diving into the dialogue system.

Initial changes were pretty easy (the lines they say when they get up after being knocked out, whether it's after or during a fight, stuff like that). But the interactions between characters, like the stuff that makes Beep and Agnu so awesome, is gonna take more time for me to unravel, so rather than sit on this forever I thought I'd share it now and the updates should be a nice surprise as they happen.