A top down bullet hell game with RPG elements where you harness the power of Colours and create your own character! The drawing determines your abilities, as each Colour is a gameplay stat and grants you specific bonuses.
Will you strive to max out your stats or to create an artistic masterpiece as you fight the horde of monsters and collect all colours?
🎨🖌️Draw your character and play now!Chroma Mancer is the game I created for my University graduation project and Bachelor Thesis. Together with the thesis, it earned me the highest grade in university (1.0 in the German system).
I have written extensively about the development and creation process behind Chroma Mancer, which you can read here, so I will only very succinctly summarise my core ideas on this post.
When choosing my theme, I knew I wanted to do something with modding - as modding games was the reason why I became interested and involved in game development when I was a kid. I wanted to make a moddable game, but with modding as a core mechanic of the gameplay loop. This led me to the idea of basing a character's gameplay stats on its sprite - because drawing new characters would be an extremely approacheable and intuitive way to modify the game - and thereby linking aesthetical expression with gameplay stats. Drawing and re-drawing the player sprite was now the key element of the game.
This idea was also influenced by my observation that many modern games feature amazingly detailed character creators, but have a complete disconnect between the character you create and its gameplay attributes. I was curious what would happen if a character's stats were inextricably linked to their visuals. How would players react to this? To find out the shocking answer, make sure to read my thesis :)
If you are interested in the detailed development and creative process behind Chroma Mancer, check a look at my full development documention and game design document linked below!
Read my full Development Documentation