I published Marginalia 📖
It is live. Marginalia (marginal notes in a book) is the game I've been working on for months, and starting today everyone can play it at playmarginalia.app: right from your browser, for free, with nothing to install.
What kind of game is it?
A 4v4 pixel art tactical auto-battler, completely deterministic. You choose up to four heroes, equip them, set the order of their skills, line them up... and then watch the battle unfold on its own.
No dice: dodges and critical hits come from deterministic counters, so the same formation against the same enemies always gives the exact same result. You win or lose before the clash even begins. If you lose, it's not bad luck: it's your team that needs rethinking.
The rules are few and you learn by watching:
- Turn order is speed. Every round, all eight combatants act, from fastest to slowest.
- Positioning decides who gets hit. Basic attacks target the first living enemy in line; special skills can target the backline, the most wounded, or the entire opposing team.
- The skill queue. Each hero has three skills in order of priority and uses the first one ready. Messing up the order means wasting turns.
The story
The Owl, student of an overseas witch, arrives in the kingdom to write his pages for the Grimoire, the book of all beasts: which ones are dangerous, which are harmless, which should be left alone. But the King has banned magic and put a bounty on every beast, and the Owl ends up in a cage. Your team frees him and escorts him across the kingdom: the Woods, the Coast, the Plain, the Mountains, the Tower, the Capital.
Along the way there are expeditions (chains of clashes, encounters, and choices, with HP carrying over from one stage to the next), heroes who join the group, dialogues, end-of-chapter bosses, and a bestiary that the Grimoire fills out as you encounter monsters.
The village, the tavern, the arena
At the village you recruit in the tavern, buy equipment at the armory, and sell materials dropped by beasts to the alchemist. Every hero is born with their own perks (Gigantism, Myopic, Thief...), keeps track of their career, and earns stars by completing their class missions.
Once you beat the Woods boss, the Champions' Arena unlocks: asynchronous PvP with an Elo ranking, where your saved team defends for you even when you're offline.
How it's made
For anyone curious about the technical side:
- A single Go binary, with the frontend embedded via
go:embedand SQLite (pure Go driver, no cgo) for accounts and progress. - The combat engine is pure and deterministic: no I/O, no clock, no randomness. Same inputs, byte-for-byte identical replays.
- It runs on a Raspberry Pi in my house, behind a Cloudflare tunnel.
- Balancing is done in hand-written JSON files, plus a simulator that calculates each hero's win rates.
- Available in Italian and English, installable as a PWA, and zero trackers: the pages don't load anything from third parties.
The sprites mostly come from Kenney's Tiny Dungeon and Pixel-boy & AAA's Ninja Adventure (both CC0), recolored for the game.
And now
It's a young game: heroes, monsters, and balancing will change frequently, and updates are posted on the game's blog, right on the homepage. If you play it, I'd love to know what you think, especially when something feels off.