Isekai: Budget

"Ara, ara... It looks like you died. How tragic..." These were the words a wandering spirit  heard before being thrust into another world: Budget.

In the distant, far reaches beyond that of the known universe, the world of Budget is in serious trouble. An alien lands on the world, declaring itself the Demon Lord. It wreaks havoc across the world; destroying bridges, flooding the world with monsters and being an all-around nuisance that keeps everyone from enjoying their lives.

The Goddess of Budget, limited by what she can do to intervene (Mainly because she only spent 131,072 god points on the planet, which seems like a miniscule amount to spend), has enshrined the towns with protection, but that will only last for so long. She is searching for a hero powerful enough to slay the Demon Lord, and after enough hardship, she finally found one.

Enter the player, a brave soul that was reincarnated and transferred to the world with Budget with a single goal in mind: Destroy the demon lord and save it.

Introduction

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The goal of this project / challenege was to create a game no larger than 128kb in size.  Originally, the challenge was set for 64kb, but that proved to be an unrealistic goal, so it was increased to help make such a project possible.  The demo (Link) and full game are complete. This page is for the full version of the game.

This project showcases the potential of this low-filesize RPG engine and the resource editor that was built and used to create all the game's resources: Palettes, tiles, sprites, maps and objects, music and sound effects, dialogue, effects, inventory, monster details and arrangements, the list goes on. The project uses no external resources and was built entirely from scratch; no external image files or music files, which keeps the filesize of the game incredibly small.

How did I keep it so small?

A resource editor was built to compact all the data into a resource file. Compressing everything to make each byte count did wonders for the filesize of this project. For instance, the raw graphics for the demo and final version is 12kb, as it uses 3 128x128 sheets for the source, plus a couple more kb for setting up the sprite sheets. Even the music takes advantage of the browser's native web oscillator support, making the largest music tracks for the game smaller than 2kb, each. These small amounts do add up, which can put pressure on the size of the dialogue, source code and other setups, like enemies and inventory.  Ultimately, the final project is a few hundred bytes shy of the target.

Why is there a silly "Press Action" at the start?

You can thank chrome browsers for that. An update made some time ago prevents anything like web oscillator from auto-playing and it confirms that someone is on the recieving end before starting anything up.

Features

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• Play and complete the full version of game. The world contains plenty of towns and dungeons to explore.
• Choose from one of two character classes, each with their advantages and drawbacks.
• Explore a world loaded with monsters that want you for dinner and towns that want you to save them.
• Mobile support added through the use of touch buttons along the sides of the screen (Hold it horinzontally for the buttons to properly appear)
• Graphics, music and sound effects are all generated by the browser.

How to Play

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Arrow Keys	* Move the player around * Select options on the menu
Spacebar	(Action key) * Execute command on a menu * Interact with obejcts/NPCs on the world map
Escape	(Cancel key) * Return to the world map on the menu * Cancel option/action

Please refer to the "How to Play" manual for details on the playing the game, inventory and enemy details.

Latest Updates

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Version 1.00 (August 14th, 2023)

• Game has been launched on itch.io

Screenshots

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