The Scratcher

Scratch. Fight. Push your luck.
In The Scratcher, you don't play your cards: you scratch them. Every ticket hides symbols under its silver coating. Each cell you reveal becomes an attack, armor or a spell, and each one heats up the BUST gauge. Keep scratching and you may hit the JACKPOT. Scratch one cell too many and you go BUST.
The question is never "which card do I play?". It is "do I scratch one more?".
Features
Scratch-to-fight combat: tickets are revealed cell by cell, and you decide when to stop.

Risk with two faces: the same scratch fills the BUST gauge and your shot at the JACKPOT.

A deck of tickets: draft them, upgrade them, burn them, and tear open boosters that can upgrade right in your hands.

Four heroes who scratch differently: the Chosen hits head-on, the Mage fuses the elements into devastating combos, the Merchant pays for his blows with the run's gold, the Thief wins by not scratching everything.

The Daily Ticket: one run a day, the same for everyone, with a leaderboard among Steam friends.

Demonic Stakes: once you have finished the game, pick your own constraints and push your score.

A city to climb: the Shantytown robs you, the Market makes you pay, the Sewers eat at your body. Every district attacks you in its own way.

Enemies that answer back: they show their next move, punish your heals and react to your armor.

Charms, events and secrets: collect charms, make choices in narrative events, uncover hidden fights and earn Gratto-Deeds that unlock new content.

The house always wins. Until now.
At the top of the city, the King runs the biggest game of all. Nobody from the Shantytown has ever set foot in his Palace. You will.
A word on AI
The Scratcher is a project I carry on my own. I'm not a programmer, an illustrator or a composer: without AI tools, this game simply wouldn't exist. I used them for the code, some of the illustrations, the music, the sound effects, the cutscene voice and parts of the text. The rules, the balancing, the art direction and every game decision are mine, and everything these tools produced was picked, edited and put together by hand.
This isn't the end goal. With this game, I want to fund a real team: artists, musicians and developers, to remake The Scratcher's assets and to create the studio's next games entirely by hand.