1 HP Wonders

Fight waves of enemies until your party is exhausted.

Control with arrow keys. Z to confirm. X to cancel. Press Enter to get to the main menu and restart the game.

This is a prototype for an idea I had for the 2019 GMTK game {jam}. The theme was "you only get one." I had never really programmed an old-school menu-based JRPG combat system before, and thought that might be interesting.  For an RPG, each character might have upwards of 1000 HP, so what would happen if each of them only had 1HP? What you get is a game about avoidance and damage prevention. To allow this, enemies telegraph their attacks and use a lane-based system so that the player knows who the enemy is about to attack as well.

I used PICO-8 for this project. There's a lot more "juice" that I would have added - more animations, SFX, etc - but I ran up against the code limit. From a design perspective, the game also needs an MP/PP system so that you don't just use your special moves all the time.

If you'd like to see the source, it's embedded in this PNG, which can be imported into PICO-8.