A mini RPG where you recruit aliens to help you.

How to play:
Pressing X will create a grid to see what is in range for battle. Press Z to start a battle.

Every item and enemy in that grid will join the battle.

Once in the battle your objective is to spawn allies in the left side and get them to the right side to destroy the enemy robot. Use the Z key to select and X to cancel/skip your turn.

Select an ally in the 1st row of the menu and then place it in the highlighted area on the left. That ends your turn.

After your opponent's turn you can either place another ally or use a special ability.

Each character has 3 special abilities that cost energy (number on the left). The number of characters you can have at once on the field is limited by the number of collumns in the abilities table.

If one of your characters walks over an item on the field it is added to your inventory. Items can be used without passing your turn.

After the battle ends, any enemy character left on the field (except the robots) can be added to your party, so don't hit them too hard ;D.

Each character can die up to three times (hp bar changes from red to purple to blue). After that they're gone. Be careful with your favorites :)

Items: fire damages all (including allies), thunder damages enemy bot leader, apple heals allies, wrench heals you robot and balls give energy of their respective color.

Character abilities: red element is for area damage, green are some weaker abilities that give you energy in other elements, blue for single target damage and hits enemy robot (if in range), yellow for heal.

More information

Status	Released
Platforms	HTML5, Windows, macOS, Linux
Rating	Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars (2 total ratings)
Author	BoneVolt
Genre	Role Playing
Made with	PICO-8

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Beyond Ceres.zip 368 kB

Comments

Titus6 years ago

This is a neat concept. I'll go ahead and list some pros and cons as well.

Pros...

I haven't played a game quite like this. The way you pull in surrounding items ties the overworld and battles together in a nice way.
There's a nice amount of variety right from the beginning. I don't feel like I'm being drip fed new monsters or mechanics.
Even though there's several systems I'm unfamiliar with, I never felt frustrated.

Cons...

I had a hard time losing, even when I was trying to.
I know there was a word limit, but item descriptions would have been nice. Most other things I was able to figure out without reading the tutorial.
I wish there were some music or sound effects.

BoneVolt6 years ago

Yeah, it's hard to lose because your robot attack is super OP hahaha :P

Lack of descriptions was more about lack of time than because of the word limit. Will add it as well as music and sfx after the jam is over.

Thanks for your input!

mikgorn6 years ago(+1)

Hi! To be honest, i am not playing this type of game very often, but i enjoyed it a lot and played for about 40 minutes. Let me briefly list my Pros and Cons:

Pros:

Graphics: Everything in the same style, animation of walking is really smooth.
Combat system: I am not sure, but i never seen anything like this, it is very unique and interesting.
Characters: All monsters looks aesthetic, like some post-apocalypse pokemons.
Intro: This reminds me about Undertale, but in a good and unique way.

Cons:

Storyline: Maybe i didn't play too much, but i didn't see any quests or storyline. Fighting with enemies is interesting, but it becomes boring after about 15 matches. Not bad, but some story, like 2-3 quests, and map showing different environment could make it much better.
Interface and tutorial: The gameplay is interesting,but it was hard for me to understand how to play. Game asks me to press "x" button and it was not working. Make controls a bit more intuitive and it will be just fine. Writing tutorial under your game is nice, but it will be much better if you can play a game without reading tutorial document

That's all, i find this game really enjoyable and unique, like an old-school gameboy game. Hope to see you in the future!

BoneVolt6 years ago

They are supposed to be aliens, but post apocaliptic pokemons works too! hahaha :D

Being compared to undertale in terms of storytelling in any way is quite a compliment for me, thanks!

Yeah I couldn't do more than just the intro. The way Pico-8 works is that the programming is limited to 8000 words to put it simply, and i hit that limit. So I have to make the code more efficient first in order to have space for more story.

Pico-8 has keys (X) and (O) which translates to Z/X unless you change it. I changed it now. Should have done it this way from the start. I will try to ramp up the complexity slowly to make the tutorial as minimal as possible.

Thanks for your feedback!