Chancemancer

Chance your way through hallways of rats, slimes, and goblins, relying on the gods of fate to guide your spells to their targets. Will you roll sky-high damage values, and break the max integer value, or get really unlucky and roll only ones, therefore perishing in a most unfortunate way?

In Chancemancer, you play as the archmage Themis, who is unfortunately in severe debt due to some gambling magic gone wrong. Fortunately enough, the nearby dungeon is full of enemies to steal from, and with the luck of the draw hopefully enough can be scrounged together to pay off everything. Let's just hope that chance magic doesn't go wrong again.

In simple terms: Run around the dungeon, kill enemies to get gold, pick up powerups and use your newfound powers to defeat stronger (and wealthier!) enemies. Do this by pressing WASD/The arrow keys to move your body into whatever you want to interact with.

But, if you want a more in depth explanation of the mechanics:

• You have a base damage value, and a set of dice which roll every time you attack. Each dice roll produces a value between 1 and the multiplier shown at the bottom of the screen for that die, so for example a x6 die will roll a d6. The base damage is then multiplied by each of these rolled values, which calculates a final attack score. If this score is greater than the enemy HP, you win, and if it's less then you lose. Visually, that means:

• The +1, +3 and +5 powerups each add 1, 3 or 5 to the max value of one random die respectively, so a d6 would become a d9 with a +3 powerup.
• The die powerup adds one extra d3 to be rolled on each attack.
• The +1 sword adds 1 to your base damage each time it is collected.
• The heart and gold simply add another hitpoint or a bit more gold, relative to what you have stored.

Want to know who you're battling and who you are? Here you go! (Descriptions coming later!)

I like the feel of this game - I don't think this is the proper definition of game feel (I've yet to get around to reading that book!), but it's a fairly small, self contained game with no main menus or complex victory screens weighing it down. In that way, it feels more like a jam game than a short web game, and I'm happy about that since it's more complete that way. That being said, and to be a bit more concrete in what I'm saying, it would've been nice to get more content in the game anyways. Only having 4 enemies feels a little small in a dungeon crawler, and some more variety between their behaviours could've been nice too. I did manage to get the foundation down for adding more, though, so there's always that.

As for the graphics, I really love what I've done with them. It's weird, because after 20 games I still don't feel like I know what I'm doing with graphics, but they're still usually my favourite part of the game. I think the dungeon background works well with being simple and not repeating too obviously, and I'm very proud of the sprites themselves, since they stand out pretty well and are detailed without looking cluttered. The squigglevision makes it look a bit more interesting as well (though it was a massive pain to do - I should probably find a way of automating that rather than drawing everything twice), and it feels surprisingly dynamic considering that there are no actual animations in the game. And the thumbnail turned out to look pretty good as well - the perspective on the face probably could've been better, but it's a lot better than my previous thumbnails with people in them, or at least it looks like it, so I'm happy enough. Of course, the above is all my opinion on art, which is probably very flawed, so feel free to tell me what you actually think about it all honestly!

As for the sounds, I'm not too happy that I'm still using CC0 music rather than making my own, but I'm also very grateful that so many people make music that is CC0 anyways, so thank you for that! The sound effects turned out pretty good, though, but it was a struggle making them feel less bfxr-y. I don't know if you know what I'm saying, but they sounded kind of like I just used the default presets on bfxr, which isn't bad in itself, but it did make the game feel like a bit less effort had been put into the sound design. Thankfully, I discovered that vibrato and arpeggio can actually make some pretty cool noises if you use them properly, so I'm now satisfied that the game sounds distinct enough from all my other games. With that all said, if you managed to make it through this veritable essay of a description/post mortem, thank you so much for taking the time to read it all! I'd love to hear what you have to think about the game too, and I'm so glad you played it! Thank you!