Blessings
=========

In order to spice up the gameplay by adding some randomness, I've decided to add
a feature called "blessings" to the game. A blessing is a random effect that
gets applied to the player and lasts for an entire level. Blessings can be be
good or bad (I guess I should call them "curses" in this case). A positive
effect might regenerate player's health every turn, or lower the stamina cost of
abilities by 1. Conversely, negative effects might involve a 10% chance to skip
a turn, or a penalty to the chance to hit.

Originally, I thought that blessings could be activated by the player using
in-game mechanics, like praying at a shrine, but then I started toying with
another idea. Because you see, my dear reader, I was also trying to solve
another problem at the same time: how to handle unidentified items. Magical
items found in the dungeon must be identified somehow and I disliked the idea of
using scrolls for that, since I always found such system a little dull. I mean
it was fine in Diablo, but it gets old fast: just hold on your items until it's
time to go in town again.

So, inspired by Slay the Spire, I thought that perhaps I could kill two birds
with one stone and ask the player to take a decision during resting: she can
spend some time either praying the gods for a blessing or identifying items. I
like the tradeoff here: do you identify items so that you can throw away junk
and free precious inventory space and maybe get some better weapon or gamble to
get a nice powerful-possibly-broken blessing?

An interesting conclusion of all this is how sometimes a solution to a problem
depends on what else is in the developer's mind. If I hadn't implemented
unidentified items first, I'd have gone with the altar solution for the
blessings and probably ended up with some different idea altogether to identify
items. One that hopefully still wouldn't have involved scrolls :)