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. You can even hold down the keys to keep moving in the same direction, to avoid getting carpal tunnel syndrome!

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!)

That's you! A disciple of the divination of chance, you use your magic abilities to try and discern fate from all the other possible outcomes. Unfortunately, you're not very good at it, hence the massive amount of debt, and the fact you have to rely on magical artifacts in the dungeon to actually do any damage. Oh well.

It's a rat! Aren't they cute? As with seemingly all other dungeon rats, they're pretty damn huge, but thankfully that hasn't translated into any meaningful strength increase over a regular rat. You'd have to actively try to be defeated by these, which would be an impressive feat. It's a shame, too, because they're so lovely! Why'd they have to be hostile?

The diceslime is a fairly regular yellow slime that somehow picked up one of the dice lying around in the dungeon. Contrary to popular belief, this didn't actually do anything except make the die all slimy and the slime a bit upset, but many adventurers still believe this imbued the slime with fate magic. It has not been imbued with fate magic, and so you don't have to worry about it too much.

The fategoblins are a certain culture of goblins which live in dark, stony buildings, like this dungeon you're in. They attempt to learn chance magic to get an advantage over all the other goblins when trying to conquer, fight or gamble with them, but have yet to actually learn to read any of the books on magic that they've stolen. They at least have shield design down; it does at least look like a die. They're trying their best.

Oddsnakes are renowned for always having an odd number of spots or markings on them, a predictable fact which makes no sense considering they live in chance dungeons. They also have the same condition that other dungeon vermin have, in that they're massive, and these particular snakes seem to have grown exceptionally powerful because of that. Researchers theorise that this is because they keep slithering through the rings lying around and absorbing their power.

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!