You are a worm. Worms love eating fruit, even though it makes them poop. But this is a good thing: poop becomes flowers and flowers bring much joy to the world.
Eat fruit, avoid poop, flowers increase the score multiplier, eating flowers makes the multiplier smaller. Use arrow keys to steer, use Z or X to jump over hazards.
This is a very quick project we did with iLkKe, as Tic Tac Toad. Going to write about the game in my blog in the near future, had so much fun making the game.
The game is also playable at itch.io
Update 1.2:
You can also use LEFT/DOWN and UP/RIGHT to rotate the worm, it's much more comfortable on a Pocket CHIP. Able to skip the level bonus countdown.
Update 1.1:
Fixed some bugs, added realistic hat physics (can pick up a hat you dropped), added a high score table!
This is AMAZING.
Production levels are through the roof. SO polished. Really well balanced.
Shame you didn't submit this to the Chain Reaction jam.
Congrats to both, can't wait to read about how it came to be!
Thank you, matt. :)
Well, the funny story is that we had to have our own "jam" because, well, we originally were making this for the p8jam... except that we got the ending date wrong. So we decided to keep the deadline WE thought was the jam deadline and try to make a fun game by this Saturday. Not sure if it would have fit the chain reaction theme though... ;)
Very nice :). One thing I'm missing is some indication of the exact direction the snake is headed - it's easy to be a few degrees off from where you want to go, and by the time it's obvious from the body, you've eaten lava ;). Maybe a mini-crosshair showing you where you're going, exactly?
Other than that, absolutely cute, and the game mechanics are top notch for this type of simple, arcadey game. Big thumbs up!
Thanks for the compliments and the suggestion! I had the same problem but after a few (dozen... hundred...) games it went away. I'll definitely look into that crosshairs idea, though!
Very well done, love the smooth turning. Gets pretty tough with the extra lava pits. Any game that can incorporate poop in a valid way is a win in my book ;)
Thanks for validating our poop! I hope the game is not too challenging, might suffer from the "gamedeveloper is the playtester" syndrome.
Really fun !
To ideas :
- each time you time the lave could be spawn in a different place
- Have you try the " paceman effect" to be able to cross from the left of the screen to the right, from the top to the bottom ?
Procedural lava would be great, though it would be hard to make fine tuned levels, e.g. the one with the small island you have to jump on in order to get to the bigger island. Thanks for the screen edge crossing idea! Maybe it could work with a scrolling "infinite" level.
We actually had a bunch more ideas we wanted to try, like scrolling procedural levels, multiplayer etc, and also some extra touches that we had to leave out cause they couldn't be done in time.
We opted to have something small but polished and complete rather than risk a half-baked ambitious attempt, but we might go back and add a thing or two in the future.
This was great fun, pico-8 is so accessible and immediate, and it perfectly recaptures the excitement of making games in basic in the 80s.
Just wondering, how far have you people gotten? What is your high score? I am trying to figure out the average score for purposes.
My personal best is 3657 so far.
This is one of my favorite pico8 game.
The gameplay is solid, and I like the score system a lot !
I made a lot of snake games and one of them actually featured poop ( and blood ) It was 6 years ago, video is here : https://youtu.be/am0OsvMVEu4
I need to train more before posting my hiscore here :D
If you have some tokens left on cart, some splash and/or sink effect in lava would be great
It is an amazing game.
My best is 1602
...after MANY games. Sigh.
Thoughts:
- I would like the ability to skip or speedup the score count in between levels by holding the button?
- collision on lava corners seems ever so slightly unfair? corners look round but collision seems square?
I like it a lot, but, strangely, it seems to crash every time I try to get past the title screen in standalone pico-8 when I try loading the game from the "splore" menu. Anybody else having this problem?
@benjamin: That game looks nice, did you ever play Pizza Worm? That might be the first snake game with the non-90-degree controls.
@matt, @emu: Thanks. :) Skipping the score countdown thing will be added. I tried to add some slack to the lava collision (you can actually stay on it for a few frames so it doesn't matter if you glance the corner) but maybe it needs even more.
@dynamite_reed: It sometimes crashes between levels here. I posted in a support thread about someone also having this problem (with his cart) but no news about that yet.
What Matt said. It looks and runs absolutely brilliant, but the actual play feels really unfair. I routinely run into lava corners that aren't there. They should be rounded, and generally the collision should be a couple of pixels more forgiving, considering how difficult it is to control the worm.
Personally, I ragequit after the twentieth time I died with four or five fruit left on the second level. :) Sounds funny, but really a player should be able to get further before getting frustrated. Even the first level feels hard. I'm not the Dark Souls type. :)
BTW, props to whomever did the pixel-pushing. I really like the artwork.
iLkKe is really good with pixels. The more limits the better. :)
Well, IMO the corners feel fair enough but difficulty is hard to judge (and I like hard games). Maybe the real problem is that the collision is done only against the center point of the head so it's not that evident when you are actually touching the tile. I'll see what I can do about that!
I think you might be right. The angle things are drawn from means I collide more traveling down the screen than traveling up the screen. If that makes sense?
Also, it would be cool if it remembered the last high score name I entered.
Yes. And since the resolution is so small, even just one pixel is a 12.5 % deviation.
I just collected the last fruit on the stage and ran into the lava with my momentum. Happy to see that it sent me to the next stage!
Still trying to get EXTEND! closest was E_TE_D
1820 now my top
Hint: The EXTEND letters drop more often if you have many flowers on screen.
2564 my best this morning.
I also collected a fruit as I jumped into the lava by accident. Something not quite right with that balance of collision detection.
@kometbomb Yes Pizza Worm, I totally forgot about this game ! You're right I think it's the first free-angle snake I played, funny to see we might have the same inspiration source !
@matt: OK, I get it, need to look into the collisions! Sheesh! Come on! ;) You will need to wait until next weekend I think. That is a quite good score!
@Felice: I am starting to agree the game should be easier, or, rather that the player should be able to get further: the levels with islands are way more fun than the first two. More challenging, though.
@benjamin: Not sure if it was Ilkke's inspiration (the game is his concept originally) but I certainly played it a lot. Also, being a Finn Nokia's Snake was basically required curriculum as well. :)
@kometbomb OK I'll stop now :P
One interesting trick I've found is that if I am about to go off the edge of the screen I can jump and try to get back on the screen as whilst I am in the air off screen I will not die 8)
Also, I'm in Finland (Helsinki & Espoo) 24th to 1st visiting family. Happy to meet for a drink and gaming chat!?
Yes, good old snake. Technically my first mobile (as in mobile phone) game. :)
Ah, those were the days.
Let's never speak of them again.
Hey! No worries.
As for old mobile, I played an amazing 3D golf game on J2ME called Vijay Singh 3D
That game looks very nice, the layout suits well the portrait screen I guess most phones had back then.
My favorite (and actually the only mobile phone game besides the original Snake I had before the current "modern" mobile gaming age) was Tower Blocks or something like that. You had to build skyscrapers by dropping new floors from a crane and it had this simple physics system that made the buildings wobble. It would probably make a fun Pico-8 clone project!
Although I don't like Snake, this is a masterpiece! Congratulations guys, great game :D
I got my first EXTEND! high now 2763
I am using this code for quicker end of level scoring:
pointspeed = 5 + 195*((btnp(4) or btnp(5)) and 1 or 0) -- 5 normal, 200 pressed addpoints(-flr(-(min(pointspeed,donepoints))), false) donepoints -= pointspeed |
original code
addpoints(-flr(-(min(5,donepoints))), false) donepoints -= 5 |
I'm wondering if I'm the only one who initially thought the lava was a weirdly angled raised red cliff?
The highlight on the worm suggests light coming from the upper left. Could the left side of the lava pit be made to suggest that same light source?
The worms head is also the same colour as the lava, meaning that they blend into one when you're close enough.
IMO the pixels are 100 % perfect but I am a bit biased. ;)
The quicker level score countdown thing is already in the new version (that I guess I'll upload tomorrow). Also some fixes to make it more playable on a Pocket CHIP!
@Ramayaben: That is quite the compliment, thank you!
Also, matt is the first person to officially EXTEND! You win... a hat perhaps?
Yay! EXTEND 🎩
I got an extra life, but there could have been some particle explosion or confetti or something? ;)
New Nokia 3310 snake should have been this game!
What part of the code is responsible for keeping each segment the same distance from each other while moving around?
I get how to do it when snapping to a grid but not sure how to go about it with a fluid/curvy snake...
Awesome Game! I noticed that you can jump on lava if you hold down the jump button... other that that, great game!
[Please log in to post a comment]
