THE GOD OF CHANCE HAS TAKEN OVER THE VAMPIRIC CASTLE: TAKE IT BACK
Use and manipulate the dice you roll each turn to most effectively deal damage to, and protect yourself from, the strange enemies in turn-based combat.
Maneuver through the castle walls and interior to reach and reclaim the throne, gaining upgrades along the way.
CONTROLS
Left/Right arrow keys: choose a category
Up/Down arrow keys: choose an option
Z key: confirm/select
X key: cancel or exit action/selection
BASICS
Each turn you get some random dice (you get two each turn at the start but can increase that number later on).
Each move accepts certain kinds of dice to perform its action. Some modify the value of the dice, such as splitting one to give you two smaller ones, combining two dice, and more that can be acquired later. Others deal damage or grant/inflict status effects.
There are three status effects, which some moves can grant, inflict, ignore or remove:
Evasion: Attacks will miss against this entity. The value decreases each turn.
Defense: Damage will be done to this statistic before the entity.
Poison: At the beginning of their turn this entity will take this much damage. The value decreases each turn.
Enemies will show who they are targeting with a symbol by their head. If that symbol is not there that means they are going to do a move that does not involve targeting someone (likely a status effect, heal, or in some cases, a multi-target attack).
After you defeat the set of enemies in a room they will yield coins which you can use to buy upgrades in the store.
You will be able to proceed to the next room, and often there will be two doors to choose between.
OTHER INFO
- A full run takes ~30-45 minutes, but you'll probably die a few times at first, so it will probably take 1 - 2 hours from first play to beat the game.
- There's a good bit of lore in the game, its all rather silly stuff. I didn't make it with much intention so any theories you can infer are fair game.
DEVELOPMENT
This game was largely inspired by Dicey Dungeons and Deltarune. The combat system is clearly derived from Dicey Dungeons, but the inclusion of three party members who have independent health and moves were more-so from Deltarune (not to mention the moving grid background).
This is the first full game that I've made in picotron, and I think it went pretty well. Picotron is still in it's alpha 0.1 stage but it's still been generally effective and straightforward in allowing me to make this, keeping many of the positive aspects from its older (yet littler) sibling, pico-8. I did have to fight to get around its oddities and constraints at times, like putting the sprites into different files so it didn't crash from lack of RAM/memory, but even that was sort of fun. However it's still far from fully fledged or practical for something like a large scale commercial game, for example.
I started work in this game soon after the beginning of August, and now I'm releasing it around the end of November, so it took about 4 months to make. This is probably my biggest game so far in most ways (playtime, art, story, etc.). I set myself the main deadline of before 2025 after a I realized this was going to be a full game and set little weekly deadlines for a bit to keep the progress going. I'll probably take a little break from working on games for a while (or at least games I'm going to try and finish or release).
I started this project with a cool idea that I didn't necessarily intend to make into a full game. I had ideas about what it could look like as a full game, but I didn't expect to actually do that. Because of that the code is really sloppy, built off of a bunch of systems I implemented just so I could play my concept.
I had a ton of nebulous ideas when I started work on the game, one of those being the intro sequence/cutscene, and making it, after the rest of the game was pretty much done, was so cathartic. I also had seven character ideas that you could pick from when starting a run, but making three was hard enough in the end. "Fireworker" was sorta turned into the shopkeeper, and the "Axetress" was going to be reworked as one of the midway bosses from a play gone wrong, but she turned into the vampire slayer skeleton. I was going to make "Mr. Tank" a mini-boss from which Wield got the defense ability, but that was scrapped and he gets said ability from the store now. I think "Vampire," "Sworder," and "Gun Girl" were good choices in the end.
CREDITS-
(if not specified assume lexaloffle credit)
- Code/Art/Music/Sounds : @Munchkin (lexaloffle) a.k.a. @PlayerTheMaker (itch) a.k.a. Crayon (Youtube)
- Rounded Rectangle Function: @wuffmakesgames (Discord)
- Triangles: @NuSan
- Audio Data Retrieval Functions: @pancelor
- OkPal palette creator/manager: @drakmaniso
- Shrinkotron: @thisismypassword (lexaloffle) a.k.a. @thisismypassport (github)
- Some Instruments: @abledbody
- Lotsa people in the Picotron discord server helped me out! (especially @Soupster [lexaloffle/Discord])
- Playtesting/Advice: friends and family
Version History
- 1.0.0, November 29th 2024: First release
-- issue: music cuts out instead of fading out (to be fixed when picotron version 0.1.1e releases) - 1.0.1, November 30th 2024:
-- issue: music cuts out instead of fading out (to be fixed when picotron version 0.1.1e releases)
-- fixed: restarting the game after winning no longer breaks door selection and coin collection
-- fixed: a missed Snipe removes all evasion on targeted enemy
-- fixed: some typos
-- changed: sparkles on win screen now only generate when the mouse is moving
-- changed: the Snipe ability now always hits after two misses in a row
itch.io website link
Please give any feedback you have. I probably won't add much of any new stuff, but I will fix bugs and balancing.
The issue I made this comment for is fixed, so I'll just say: Thanks for checking out the game! I hope you play it and have fun! (or maybe you already have if you're looking at the comments all the way down here)
previous text: So as of positing this there's a "system mismatch error" that shows up on all BBS cartridges, try and use your mouse to go and close that little pop up because it blocks some text in places. (the mouse also disappears when in the game so its a bit tricky)
Nice game! The character animations and banter give it extra charm.
Dude... I actually audibly gasped upon seeing this!
(Edit)
Wait... How the heck is your cart allowed to be so large?!
@Verb I glad you like them! I was a bit worried the chats (especially the first) were too long and boring at first.
@Turbochop I was surprised too, Picotron compression is weird. I think the compressed data that's actually in the cart right now is 256kb or less, but the png file is more (like 400kb). I also had to use Shrinkotron to get it to actually save as a png, so without that the data is definitely more than 256kb.
@Munchkin that is actually really good to know! It means I can adjust my design philosophy for my own project. Congrats once again on the release!
I absolutely was not ready for this. It's an awesome game, congratulations! I can absolutely see where it's components were taken from but having it implemented on Picotron is incredible!
This is AWESOME! I'd definitely buy a more full-featured version of this!
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