Planned Release Date: Apr 27, 2026

About This Game

A roguelite classic turn-based JRPG built in RPG Maker MZ. Draft your party. Customize their skills, weapons, and items. Conquer the dungeon. Die trying.

Better Luck Next Run takes the classic turn-based JRPG formula from the 16-bit era and adds roguelite elements to it. Every run offers new combinations from over 400 options.

Draft Your Party: Choose from 50 unique characters, each with their own class, weapon type, stats, and playstyle. Equip them with weapons, skills, and items from a pool of 400+ options.

Classic Turn-Based Combat: Exploit elemental weaknesses across 10 biomes, each with unique enemies and shrines. A standard run takes roughly 30-60 minutes.

Epic Boss Battles: Face 5 challenging bosses, each demanding different strategies to overcome.

Permanent Progression: Spend gold at the shop to permanently unlock new weapons, skills, characters, and items. Changes occur in the hub with every run.

Secrets Await: There are plenty of secrets to unlock. Completing your first run is just the beginning.

Features

• 50 characters, 100+ skills, 250 weapons, 50 items

• 10 biomes with unique elemental enemies and shrine effects

• 5 challenging boss encounters

• Persistent hub with permanent unlocks

• Challenge modifiers for increased difficulty and rewards

• Steam Achievements and Cloud Save

• Keyboard, mouse, and controller support

• Full Steam Deck support

*While I did use Claude Code to assist in development (solo developer), I would like to support artists as a former professional photographer. A portion of all revenue generated by this game will go directly to paying a starving artist (or two) to create original RPG Maker MZ assets for Better Luck Next Run. I would like to replace all the enemy art and environment art with custom, handcrafted assets from real artists. So by supporting this game, you'll be supporting an artist or two.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

AI was used to assist with programming and refining in-game text (item descriptions, skill descriptions, UI text). Key art and logo are human-created. All other visual and audio assets are default RPG Maker MZ assets provided under license.