Mechs Tape gets animated dice and a SNES-style battle screen (devlog)

Two updates landed back to back, and they’re really one idea: make the moments you hit every few seconds feel like the 16-bit RPG in my head. The dice should roll. A fight should look like a fight. Now they do.

The dice actually roll now

Until recently, a dice roll in Mechs Tape just… appeared. The numbers flickered for a beat and settled in place. It worked, but it never felt like throwing dice.

Now your dice get tossed across the screen — a chunky pixel-art d6 for each die in your pool. They tumble through the air, land, and a 5–6 lights up as a hit. The result arrives when the dice land instead of just being reported.

A Mechs Tape challenge roll — pixel-art dice in the tray, a five lit green as a hit, reading 'yes, but'. — A challenge roll: a five lights up green as a hit, and the result reads *yes, but*.

It’s the same everywhere a roll happens — investigating a ruin, talking your way past a stranger, every stance in a fight — so the whole game reads one way. Same odds, same rule (5–6 = hit); the roll is just the event it always should have been.

Fights look like fights now

This is the big one. A combat encounter used to be a wall of text with a tiny “you vs. it” box tucked at the bottom. The fight was the smallest thing on the screen.

Now combat opens into a side-view battle scene, the way a SNES-era RPG would stage it: the terrain you’re standing in as the backdrop, your mech on the left and the enemy on the right, both up at a real size on the ground in front of you.

Mechs Tape side-view battle screen — the mech faces a band of marauders across a wrecked overpass, with the enemy's wound track overlaid. — The new battle screen — your mech, the enemy, and the wastes you're fighting in.

And it moves. You step forward as you act. The thing you hit flashes red. When its swing connects, your mech flashes and the whole scene shakes. Win and the enemy fades out; lose and your mech goes down. The scene-setting text is still there — it just tucks into a one-line log you can tap open — so the fight leads and the words wait their turn.

One more touch: a fight now announces itself. The moment a battle screen opens, a short synth sting hits — that little “here we go” jolt every console RPG taught us to feel. (It’s a procedurally generated chiptune, like every other sound in the game.)

Same game, more game

None of this changes the math or the choices — your odds, your stances, the dice rule are all exactly as they were. It’s the presentation catching up to the design. And it’s all built from art and sound the game already had, so it stayed light.

It’s live and free in your browser — no account, no install, plays offline once it loads. Go roll some dice and pick a fight. 📼