Planned Release Date: 2027

About This Game

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.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

This game was developed with the help of an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic). The code (the chiptune music included), the ASCII drawings and the store images were produced with it from the author’s ideas and script. The writing is the author’s; its English and Latin American Spanish adaptations were made with the help of the same model. The game does not generate anything with AI while you play.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

No sexual content. Violence is limited to cartoonish turn-based battles against ASCII drawings of everyday annoyances, with no blood or gore. The story deals with financial stress, depression, grief over a mother’s death from cancer and a father’s mental illness (paranoid delusions), always with dark humor. Contains some swearing and references to alcohol, including a grandfather who lets his 15-year-old grandson drink beer.