Balance Mender

A tactical dungeon game from the mender's side of the fight. The healing is all yours, and so is every number in it.

One world, walked upstream through four colours — the Green, the Rust, the Glow, the White. Nothing you fight is evil; every creature is inflamed by a wound in the land, and a room won is Mended.

The guiding idea: nothing is planned and everything works. Balance Mender is a malleable playground where the player sets the rules of play — compose whichever abilities, party and enemies you want, and tune the numbers until the fight feels right. Long term the balance lab grows into the game rather than sitting beside it.

🎮 Play on https://balancemender.0sk.ar

The game is an evening hobby project in progress and happy to welcome new contributors.

Development

bun install
bun dev
bun run sim --repeat 10   # play out fights headlessly and report on them

Documentation

This is a website and uses vite as build system.

→

1. index.html loads src/main.ts
2. main.ts renders the menu and sets up the dev tools
3. main.ts also creates a GameLoop. The game loop ties everything together. It continuously renders components/ui.ts to its element DOM node (assigned via main). Actually, should just make it a web component.

The game engine in src/vroum/ provides Node and Task primitives that run on a Loop. It is inlined from vroum.

To render DOM nodes, https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml is used.

Animations are made using CSS and gsap.

See the docs/ folder for more — architecture is the map, combat is why the fight works the way it does, and simulation explains how fights are run and analysed without a browser.

Notes

• Most spells trigger a global cooldown (GCD) of 1.5 seconds. During this time you cannot cast any other spells
• Mana regen is paused for X seconds after a cast completes

References

• Games as World of Warcraft, Mini Healer, Little Healer
• https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/game-loop.html
• https://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/theory/mechanic/spell/heal?spec=PriestHoly&version=live
• http://www.musinggriffin.com/blog/2015/10/26/mechanics-damage-over-time
• https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/3hrgp5/little_healer_wow_healer_simulator_nostalgia/
• https://flotib.github.io/WoW-Healer-Training/index.html
• https://questionablyepic.com/
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rD3V8v3pm8BdjqOs6izsFhw79qvZ-vp3uYZYMTz62WU/edit#gid=0
• https://www.wowhead.com/classic/spells/name:renew#0-2+20
• https://mksf-birdup.itch.io/mmo-healing-simulator
• https://html.itch.zone/html/10666420/6-13-24/index.html