Primortal

Primortal is the game I’ve been chipping away at as a hobby for years - the “actually build a real RPG” itch that’s been in the back of my head since high school. You play an astrobiologist who explores alien planets by remotely piloting a humanoid mech, capturing the lifeforms you find and harnessing their powers, while the story of the corporation you work for slowly unravels. It’s deliberately built to feel like a game you’d play on a Game Boy Advance.

How it works

• A custom engine, in Go. Rather than reach for an off-the-shelf game engine, it’s built on an engine I wrote - which is half the point. The GBA form factor is a real constraint that shapes the art, the resolution, and the input model.
• Explore and capture. You pilot an Animech across alien worlds, find creatures, and catalog their physical and metaphysical properties - their Primortal forms - with an in-world tool. Captured lifeforms feed back into what you can do.
• Tactical, turn-based combat. Combat mixes turn-based skill selection with well-timed execution - pick your skills, then land them.
• Pixel art, mostly hand-tuned. The look is bought-and-heavily-modified sprite work pushed toward a consistent retro style; the devlog is largely a trail of art and animation passes.

The feel

The Game Boy Advance form factor isn’t nostalgia dressing, it’s the constraint everything else answers to. The whole game renders to a 240x160 canvas and reads five inputs - A, B, the D-pad, Start, Select - and capping resolution and controls that hard is deliberate: it keeps scope honest, forces the mechanics to stay legible at a glance, and means it plays the same on a handheld as it does on a desktop. The other rule I hold myself to is that a 15-minute sitting should earn real progress - it’s a game you pick up between things, not one that wants your whole evening. Combat is where “easy to learn, hard to master” has to pay off: you pick skills turn by turn, then land them on timing, so a fight is a few clean decisions rather than a menu you grind through.

Notes

It’s a hobby project and openly a work in progress - the devlog exists mostly so I can look back and see that I’ve actually made progress when it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a playable demo up on itch.io, linked above. It’s password-gated so the listing isn’t a proper release yet - the password is animech.