Essencelord
The demo for Essencelord, a loot-driven action adventure where gear and skills define your playstyle, built for the Game Boy Color!
You've just graduated from Marty Butterblatt's School of Sword & Sorcery! You've been tasked with harnessing the power of Essence to discover its secrets as it spreads and corrupts the world and its creatures. Along the way you'll help local citizens, uncover the mystery of the Essence, and figure out how you're going to pay off your student loans!
Features
- Defeat enemies and bosses to gain Essence, a resource that allows you to level up and create gear.
- Semi-permanent gear where there is no inventory and every gearing decision means replacing what you currently have!
- Customizable skills through the Skill Modifier system allowing you to define how you want to play!
- Bosses to defeat, citizens to help, and loans to pay!
Controls for web version:
Z - A Button X - B Button
Enter - Start Shift - Select
D-Pad - Arrow Keys
Download
Install instructions
Available to play in the web version above or with the free .gbc and .pocket files.
Development log
- Pre-Alpha 1 of Project ARPGFeb 19, 2026
Comments
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I liked it. My own personal taste would be the fireball spell casting time be a little faster.
Appreciate you giving it a shot! Things will definitely start off a little slower but the gearing and ability modifiers you can get as you progress will significantly impact cast/attack/move speeds.
In fact, the Aqua Slash ability modifiers are designed around mobility with increased movement speed on kill and teleportation on kill.
This is cool. Looking forward to the third skill tree.
Thanks for playing! The plan right now is to release another class with 2 more skills and work on the 3rd class skill for each later in development. Overall I’m targeting 3 classes each with a unique playstyle mechanic (the wizard-like class is increasing skill power in some way when you hold b before attacking) and 3 abilities with unique modifiers for each.
Have you thought of looking into using projectiles to display damage numbers, with them emitting from the damaged enemy/character? I've been playing with this in my own game and so far I can make it display based on a set "power level" variable. By increasing this number, you can simulate getting a better weapon, stronger attack, etc.
Interesting! I might play around with that but it would be very heavy on sprite usage and I'm pretty much at the cap already. A big problem i have is because the player attack proj is dynamic based on class, main skill selected + modifiers all those sprits have to be loaded in so if I can find a way to redesign that so only the active skill is actually loaded and instead the projectile tiles take up x amount of ram space and just swap in/out . That'd be a huge undertaking though.