This was supposed to be an adventure game inspired primarily by Occidental Quest, and Neuro-sama's LIFE music video, where Neuro travels through a virtual world in an attempt to recover all the memories she can of her friends (which then join her as extra characters) and things of value to her in general (which add new tools for her to use in combat). It is instead a demo of mechanics which could be used to put together such a game, given more time.

Because working solo on a short game jam is the perfect time to create an experimental combat system, right? What's the worst that can happen? Spending 2 out of 3 days on implementing it, leaving no time for adding actual content or balance or enemy AI that is smarter than picking moves at random? Don't be ridiculous.

I of course didn't get anywhere close to adding the tutorials, so here's the quick summary:

In the exploration scene, move by clicking the hex tiles adjacent to the character (represented by the white circle)

In the combat scene, you take turns placing shapes on the board, trying to get them to overlap with as many special tiles as possible. The tiles are as follow:

• Red: deal damage to all enemies you're connected to.
• Yellow: connect to another enemy. When this is being executed, the enemies become highlighted and you have to click on the one you want to connect to.
• Green: heal yourself.
• Blue: gain damage reduction for the rest of the round.
• Purple: gain a percentage bonus to all damage, healing and damage reduction that round.
• Cyan: the only negative effect tile. Gain a percentage penalty to all damage, healing and damage reduction that round.

By far the most experimental feature is the RAM, which you can see in the top left corner during combat. The board itself takes up some RAM, as do your characters, the enemies, and all the shapes placed during that turn. If there's not enough RAM left, you won't be able to place down more expensive pieces.
In a full game different locations and enemies would drain different amounts of RAM, you'd be able to manage your team and the shapes they have available to them, giving more purpose to this system.
And yes, I purposefully adjusted the cost calculations to make the turtle piece have a cost of 987.

If there's any interest in it at all, I'll probably continue working on this project.

Neuro's sprite is from https://kotgedev.itch.io/neuro-sama-pixel-art-asset-compilation
The enemies are modified from one of 0x72's CC0 packs.
The background was made by Claude AI.
The remaining bad graphics are all mine.