Making Ends Meet

It is the 22nd. Eight days until payday. The account holds $31.40.

Sandra Mon is 40, divorced, and has a teenage son who communicates in monosyllables and memes. You do not reach the end of the month: you cross it. It is a dungeon. It always was.

Making Ends Meet is a turn-based ASCII RPG, sarcastic and a little sad, about what it takes to get to payday. Avocado toasts are enemies, unexpected expenses wander around on their own, and at the far end of every dungeon someone is waiting to explain life to you. Your choices do not matter. The game keeps count anyway.

What is inside

• Your health is your money. Every hit costs you dollars. Eating the enemy, if it is edible, saves you a meal.
  
• Turn-based battles with types: Wit, Passive-aggressive, Evasion, Delulu... and Food. Bosses do not go down to brute force: each one has its weak spot.
  
• End-of-month dungeons: unexpected expenses that send you back to the door, forks that lead to the same place (but pick one) and a newspaper full of absurd news stories, every one of them real, with date and source.
  
• A family, more or less: your dad, who sees flash mobs where there is only a bar, and your son, who charges you ten bucks to help.
  
• Choices that do not matter, and a counter that puts it in writing.
  
• Three versions with their own jokes: US English (dollars and payday), Spain Spanish and Latin American Spanish.
  
• Deliberately crude ASCII drawings, an original chiptune soundtrack and a Game Boy theme.

Free demo, coming soon

The first five chapters: the end-of-month dungeon, the second lap, the raise, Dad's place and the gym bro.