I'm having a difficult time understanding a lot of that, but...

You can't train the other Guardians before the Deen mission; they're not in your party before that, and the levels of party members when they join isn't determined by your party's level.

I like to encourage some trial and error in combat, but since there are so few Forest Hulks to do trial and error on, I don't think it would hurt if I let you guys know that fire magic can help you a lot with them. Bolt may have higher base damage than Fire, but that doesn't mean it's more useful for every situation. Most of the attack spells in this game have status effects they can inflict occasionally, and some enemies are much more vulnerable, not just to damage from the elements, but to the status effects that go along with the spells.

You're right that you don't get money from fights, but a higher level will make the missions easier. But there is another source of money aside from missions; you can find stuff when you're out exploring combat areas which you can exchange for money. In the case of the areas so far, it's only queenswhite, but there are going to be more over the course of the game.

I think you have to grind on encounters on the world map for either of your characters to make it as high as level 15 by the end of this update. I didn't do that in my own playtesting (I didn't want my characters to be extra strong and have an easier time than most players would,) and I never made it up that high. It definitely shouldn't be necessary in order to beat all the plot-required battles.

Here's another hint on something I hope too many players haven't been missing. It's a good idea talk to people around town after plot events like finishing a job. Guardians live on the gratitude of the public! In very concrete, material terms. You'll be sleeping in strangers' houses a lot, but also getting gifts from people who want to help you out.

Edit: As an added note, I don't think of what's out so far of the game as a "demo." I don't plan to get to a point where I'm going to tell my audience "Okay, I've demonstrated enough, now you have to wait for the whole rest of the game to come out at once." Releasing the game in gradual updates helps keep me on something like a proper schedule. That doesn't mean I'm going to be releasing every new update month by month. The next update is almost certainly going to take longer, since it has a lot of large areas and far more NPCs to write for than the previous updates. This isn't part of some serial escalation where I'm developing bigger and bigger plans for each update until it becomes unsustainable, those elements of this update have been planned since way before I started the game. The first update of the second chapter (which is still quite a while off) is also going to take a lot longer, because the gameplay will start to become more nonlinear at that point. But in general, I want to keep these releases coming at a pretty frequent pace.

Hmm... I might be able to resolve that by adding a skip contingency to the move instruction, but if I did that, then a player who got cornered by a monster might be able to escape and force their way through the event barrier, which would be a problem in itself since there's really nothing in that direction. The map cuts off precipitously after a while because there's no reason for the player to be there.

I can experiment with some fixes for this, but I'll probably wait on the next content release to change it for the download, because it's a situation most players probably shouldn't end up in in the first place.

Making the imps not follow the player would prevent the player from getting trapped, but I'm not fond of it as a solution, because that affects the atmosphere of the sequence which all players are going to be exposed to, whereas only a small fraction of players should risk being trapped unless they place themselves in a situation to cause that deliberately. Also, monsters in general chase you in this game; that's not just a gameplay element, as an element of the setting, aggression towards people is part of what makes people categorize monsters as monsters.

Making the walkways bigger is a possibility, but I'm concerned that as an interior area, I've already way overbuilt the school relative to other areas in the game. For a building, it's already kind of excessively large.

I don't want to get players stuck in unwinnable situations which force them to lose significant amounts of progress by resetting, but it actually wasn't my intention to begin with for the introductory section to be challenge-free. Originally, I actually planned for more significant monster avoidance elements in the beginning which were mostly cut. I'm reluctant to further diminish the tension of that section by making it almost impossible for the player to enter a threatening situation.

This is going to be a long game, and I can't promise that nothing could ever come up that would prevent me from completing it, but barring sudden death I can at least promise that if I stop actively working on it, I'll say so.

Dammit, I should have known changing anything at the last minute was going to break something.

The second issue is easy to fix. The problem is that all the extra music I added to this update made the file size really big, so I got rid of some of the music files in favor of lower-fidelity versions which took up less space. That event is one where I failed to properly swap out the music for the new version.

The first issue, I can hazard a guess what the problem is, but it's hard to be sure, because the problem does't arise in my own copy of the game. I'll upload a fixed version which should resolve the crashing issue, and will probably fix the invisible character issue, but I can't be sure until players report back on that one.

Being sneaky isn't really Guardians' forte.

Did the cloaked sprites show up properly in the fixed version?