A game made in a language more than 25 years old.
Developed and maintained by one single person since 2022.
BETA SIGN-UP IS NOW LIVE!
Are you perhaps interested in seeing Battles of Bench release its open beta earlier? Take the form to express your demand! Tiny secret - it might just be in development soon enough. Let's say around 20 years left, right?
What exactly is this?
Battles of Bench is an interesting hybrid of tons of different game inspirations and play styles, but the main way it could described best would be "turn-based, text-interface RPG with both retro and modern elements."
Yep. It's yet another try at a mildly unprofessional developer trying to create a huge project again.
Here's the project I took most of my inspiration from - Battles of Batch. Check it out!
So, what can you expect?
The background of the UI will depend on your Windows desktop wallpaper! Here's mine.
Ever dreamed of a terminal game that had more settings than levels? Us neither - but then that dream was true. From how you get called to your character screen data type (whatever that even means), you can customize all you want.
Looks matter, even in a text-based game. Engineered for appearance first, simple guides and visuals indicate what to do. With ASCII art and Unicode trickery, it looks... weirdly satisfying for a terminal program. We even invented a new control method for the entire UI - your keyboard! No mouse action here.
No need to install 2 separate launchers, download 80 gigabytes of game data and go through data verification for the 50th time. It just runs.
Inventory and sorting options are available in Settings & info > UI & Windows appearance > Inventory weapon sorting.
New in a24.0! Multiple organization tools, item locking, simple levelling, and even auto-sorting keeps all your weapons and armor neat! No endless scrolling through junk anymore. Just 5 taps and you're done with everything. (No, really!)
Audio cues for little things you do, subtle music in the background, and of course, endless customization in your audio settings make your experience even better. Yes, there's 170 different audio files. No, before you ask, we're not insane.
In beta! By default, you're running as every game should, so locally! However, you can also opt in to enable cloud sync. Simple! Your data will stay the same everywhere - just sit back and relax.
What about performance?
Itโs definitely not the fastest beast out there. However, regular backend optimizations keep Battles of Bench running relatively smoothly. We're getting to stages now that the game will soon run okay on lower-range PCs and mid-range laptops too!
Check out the graph here - a main loading time has been cut down by 3 seconds over time!
And there's more tweaks to come, of course.
What you'll need to get started:
A PC running at least Windows 10. No Linux port for my fellow users, it's unfortunately Batch.
You can use any terminal theoretically, but Windows Terminal is the best option. Highly recommended.
No spaces in the folder names. I coded the entire file system wrongly, so that's a hard limitation.
Install Python too! This helps background scripts keep running smoothly.
And then - just open run.bat or launch.bat - whichever one you see.
You're up and running! Hopefully.