Highroller
A 2D puzzle-RPG about chance
2 Person Project • Hobby Project • 10 Months development
My role:
Solo Programmer, Game Designer
You play as Sprout looking to solve the mystery of your origins and what happened to your long forgotten race. Combat is done by rolling dice and trying to match the dice of the enemy. Enemy attack can be blocked or dodged similarly to the Paper Mario games.
The project is currently on hold while we're working on our other game, Project: Dark Star.
Tile Encounters
Highroller has a random enemy encounter system similar to that of old Pokémon games. Sprout can channel the energy of most tiles and has a chance to gain health, nature energy or encounter an enemy. These procentages and enemy pools differ between areas.
The combat is turn based and start with Sprout rolling some new dice, the player should try to match the enemies' dice to defeat them, if they cannot they need to pass and wait for better dice next round. The enemies will attack in order and the player can either try to block the attack by pressing before it connects to prevent 1 damage or dodge the attack to prevent ALL damage but the timing window to do so is shorter.
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The Swinecone's ability increases his dice every turn while also increasing his damage. The player can save a dice for next turn by locking it to wait for the Swinecone's dice to increase.
The Dungbee is a coward and does not come out from his shell until he's the last enemy remaining, his dice requires the player to combine multiple dice to match his number.
Defeating multiple enemies on the same turn gives the player more experience so it can be worth it to save your dice until you can take out multiple enemies at once.
Enemy Battles
One of the main design challenges of this project was making the combat rewarding for the player. Since the dice are random each round it's important that the player have enough agency over this randomness and the outcome of the fight as to not feel cheated by bad luck. To address this issue we gave the player the ability to "lock" dice to save them for next round and equippable abilities found later in the game that can alter the values of your dice.
Since the enemies' dice are their health essentially, if the player is very lucky it's possible to "one-shot" a whole encounter if they roll the correct dices at the start. To combat this we designed enemies with high dice numbers so the player needs to combine 2 or 4 dice to defeat them lowering the odds of it happening on the first turn, enemies that have a changing dice or cand interact with the players dice and bosses that have multiple dice that needs to be matched before they are defeated.
Design challenges:
Mini boss battle
This Vine Weaver miniboss has multiple lives and require the player to combine their dice to match that of the Vine Weavers. Every turn, and when he takes damage, the Vine Weaver spawns more spiderlings for the player to deal with. The player have to choose if they should focus their efforts on taking down the weaver as quickly as possible or if they should spare some dice to take care of the spiderlings.
Interactive Objects
All objects in the game can be interacted with to bypass obstacles, talk to NPCs or look for hidden treasures.
Save System
The game has a save system that stores all important data such as player stats, inventory items, permanent changes to objects and more. All game objects that needs their data to be stored subscribe to static save & load events, when these events are fired they will save or load their specific data, in some cases writing custom serialization surrogates was neccessary. When moving between scenes data from all previous scenes are stored in temporary files that is written into permanent json files when the player saves the game.
The inventory holds everything you need in the wild. Items you pick up, berries and seeds that can be planted and harvested at a later time, abilities to give you the edge in battle and a bestiary to keep track of the enemies you've encountered.
