Abaclash

Abaclash is an abacus based autobattler. You have an abacus for health, an abacus gold, and an abacus that ticks up once per second. Slot magical beads into these abaci to defeat foes in abacus combat. Requires some knowledge of bi-quinary abaci, but if you know anything about base systems you can probably figure it out by playing. Win by defeating all of the premade enemies (shown with an in-game counter), after which it goes into a randomized endless mode.

*Controls:*
M to mute music, mouse control for everything else.

In the shop you can spend gold to purchase new beads, reroll the beads in the shop , or add an additional blank beads to an abacus. To purchase a bead, drag it from the shop onto one of the beads on your abacus. This will replace the bead you dragged it onto. You can also move around beads you already own be swapping them with each other.
Adding additional beads to an abacus increases the max number it can reach, and gives additional slots to place special beads. You can click the magnifying glass to preview the upcoming opponent, and click next once you are ready to begin the battle. Reduce your opponents health to 0 to win.

*How to read an abacus:*
```

0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
o	o	o	o	o
					o	o	o	o	o
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	o	o	o	o		o	o	o	o
		o	o	o			o	o	o
			o	o				o	o
				o					o
o					o
o	o				o	o
o	o	o			o	o	o
o	o	o	o		o	o	o	o

```

Starting from the bottom right corner, bottom 4 beads of a column represent ones, top bead represents fives. Going to the left each column is ten times the previous.

*Tools:*
emacs (does this give points for old tech?), llvm, aseprite, reaper

since it needs to be said these days I used 0 ai :)

Development notes
I started from a very bare bones custom base layer to get games in wasm without enscripten bloat, mostly written in plain C with a bit javascript to glue things to the browser. It took me a while to settle on the final concept but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I knew from the start I wanted to do something around abacuses. My first idea was a zelda-like where you can use the abacus to cast magic and progressively unlock secrets (I played Tunic recently which inspired me), but I couldn't figure out how to make the abacus mechanics fun and interesting in a way that really uses the abacus as more than a numeric counter. I spend about half a day trying to make that work before scrapping it. Once I pivoted to an autobattler, the mechanics started clicking much better and I was pretty sure the concept had legs. I think the final mechanics turned out well (modulo some balancing and tuning), and I hopefully got just enough content done for it to be fun and show off its potential. A big thing I think would have helped a lot with the readability of the game would be some visual effects to show the sources of what's causing what affect on each abacus and bead, but that sadly didn't get done on time. As usual I ran out of time for the sound effects, so there is a single sound effect in the game that was hastily made by me making a noise with my mouth.