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Octo Rancher
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About the game
You are a Junior Monster Summoner who has to prove yourself before moving up to Super Monster Summoner. The proving ground is the Junior Battle Grounds, a ladder of ranks to climb through duels, and your only tool is a monster that you bring to life yourself.
It starts at the summoning circle. Using the movement keys you draw a magical rune on the circle, erase it if you do not like it, and finish the summoning. A monster appears. The game keeps more than sixty different ones, and many of them are built from two halves, so their names are two words joined by a dash. Each monster has a level, which sets how hard its attacks hit, a health bar and a rank.
The menu has three entries. Fight sends your monster into a battle: win and it gains a level, lose and it dies. Train trades one point of health for one level, which makes it stronger but can kill it if you push it too far. Summon releases the current monster and lets you draw a new one.
Fights are a three-way guessing game. You choose between physical attack, defence guard and magical strike, and each beats one of the others: physical beats magic, magic beats defence, and defence beats physical. The opponent visibly hesitates before it commits, and watching that hesitation is the whole skill. Every win raises your rank, and the game is over when you reach rank nine.
Playing it here
Octo Rancher is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. It uses the plain CHIP-8 instruction set and a small monochrome screen. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.
Click Play, press E on the title screen, then draw your rune on the summoning circle. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| E | continue from the title screen; confirm |
| W, A, S, D | move the cursor on the summoning circle (drawing the rune); W and S choose in menus |
| Q | erase the rune |
| E | finish the summoning; confirm a menu entry or a battle choice |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Watch the opponent decide. In battle the other monster shows its hesitation before it commits. Use it to pick the choice that beats it.
Training is not free. Each level you buy costs one point of health, and a monster at zero health dies. Train when you have health to spare.
Losing is not the end. A dead monster just means summoning a new one. Your rank goes on.
Credits and licence
Octo Rancher was made by SystemLogoff and is distributed with an instruction manual, written like a retro game booklet, that explains the rules and lists some of the monsters. The in-game text is in English. It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The game is kept in the Chip8 Community Archive, which places everything in it in the public domain under CC0 1.0. The licence text is linked from this page.