I wanted to make something smaller, and entirely GUI elements, so I ended up playing a bunch of single player roll and write style games for inspiration. I at first kind of wanted to do something akin to the style of games that allow one to creatively draw stuff, like making a map. But I wasn’t too sure about how to implement some kind of mechanic to check what someones drawn. It’s something I want to go back do, mapmaking I think is pretty fun, so a game that focuses on that would be fun to make. One game I eventually settled on liking was the solo varient of a game called “Merchants of Magick” by RockManor Games. It was decently fun, short but with an interesting dice placement mechanic that I liked. I felt like some aspects were a bit lacking, so I thought I’d make something similar to it, taking it’s main mechanic but spicing up these other aspects a bit more.

The result is Charm & Chance.

The main thing I wanted to change was making the shops benefactors. In the board game, I felt these were fairly bland characters with very little focus. Since I was going to make this a fully solo game, I wanted to expand these characters and make them a little more interesting, with a wider array of custom orders, different upgrades per person, and even a different list of inventory items to aim for.

I’m pretty happy with a few things I’ve done on this game, in particular my process for making art is getting more refined, especially character art. I still have more to learn and improve but I’m begining to build a bit more “style” I guess and learning more about tools to help me within Krita for example. I compare the art I’ve done for this to previous games I made in the last year, like Gunstorm Rebels, and It helps me kinda break past the imposter syndrome and see for certain that “Yes, I AM improving”.

I’ve also started to better organize the project itself within Godot, finding an interesting mix between organizing aspects of the game which remind me a lot of how projects were organized in my previous job. Makes me feel like even at this level I’m being at least a tad more professional.

Anyway I hope you have fun with Charm & Chance.