awesome game, really awesome...
can i download it and play on pc? its a little laggy on web... thanks
I may have spent longer than i should have playing this game! Really fun and challenging! I'm working on a similar game and would like some help please? hit me up if you can help!
This is officially my favourite ever Pico-8 game. If it was a physical console, this would easily be one of its must-have "killer app" games.
I made a video for it recently if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/pJmm18dQQEo
Thought this might amuse you:
These days, when I see a necropost, I automatically wonder, "Is it a spammer, or is inphanta playing their game?"
Always relieved when it's the latter. ;)
Is there any reason not to just warp ahead when you have the option?
Very classic PICO-8 game. I absolutely love the design, very juicy graphics. However this game is WAY too hard for me.
@benjamin_soule Hi, and apologies for the long delay in actually posting something here. This was one of the games that made me love the Pico-8, and for the past year it has been one of the favorite games for my 6-year-old and myself to play together, as Bubble Bobble is one of his favorite games!
There were, however, two quirks in the 2-player game that made the game more frustrating than pleasant at times (one also manifested itself in the 1-player version of the game), and so I took a stab at addressing them myself, but wanted to run them by you as I'm not sure whether they are intended (i.e. features, for game balance) or not (bugs).
They are:
a) The two players share the same balls pool;
b) The player can only have 4 unique balls in play at any time, and after that it kills the first one to launch another one of the same color;
The first consequence of these two constraints means that, when playing in two players, we need to be very careful in terms of who's shooting at a time, because we may be unintentionally removing shots from the other player - meaning that their balls won't go so far as they would be going if they were shooting by themselves. Effectively, if both players are constantly shooting, each of them will only shoot two balls, and both of them will only travel for... 20 frames, as after 20 frames for both players you'll have to shoot again a ball with a same BALL ID that's in use, instead of them running for 60 frames or until they hit an enemy.
The second side-effect of these constraints means that when the player picks up the pink potion (the one to have a higher shot rate), even in player 1 mode it means that the if the player holds the fire button his shots will be very short as they'll be killed after less frames than before. I don't know if it makes you shoot twice as fast or more, but it makes their lifespan half or less.
This makes it even worse in a 2-player game as it really drains the ball pool so quickly that we need to coordinate so that only one of us shoots at a time, otherwise our balls will be killed before they actually hit enemies.
I'm attaching a tweaked cartridge for your review/comments, as I don't want to make the game unbalanced vs the original. Changes I made:
- Make the ball pool be 32, so that if two players get the pink potion things still work for the most part;
- Cycle ball colors in 7 colors so that there are more colors, and they're not always the same for the same player. It could be 5 as well. If we do it in 4 only, each player will only shoot 2 colors if they're both holding the shoot button, which isn't quite pretty. This is a cosmetic choice.
I don't recall making any other change, but since I don't know how to diff the code, I apologize if any of my other attempts at tweaking the game made it here.
Would love your comments and feedback around whether any of these are by design, or whether I broke something with these changes.
Thank you for the awesome game!
EDIT: actually fixed an issue with the Extra Lives score thresholds not resetting between games, as we're effectively deleting from the original table (the initialization doesn't make a copy of the table - now it does). This should effectively be a bugfix at least. :)
xtra = {}
for orig_key, orig_value in pairs(xtra_base) do
xtra[orig_key] = orig_value
end |
This is a great little game, but seems to have been made before pico-8 added the _update60 method, so I've had a quick go at converting it to run at 60fps:
I changed the _update method to _update60, and have divided things like accelerate and movement rates by 2. There are a couple of things I haven't been able to fix though, such as the ball fire rate and the rate at which they bounce. Not too sure how to fix the player jump rate and vertical animation rate either. If anyone could help finish this off, that would be great.
I started the game, stunned a caterpillar with my balls, threw it at another caterpillar, a key appeared, I picked it up and got teleported to level Fuckty-Million and got instantly gangbanged by boomerangs and lighting bolts.
A++, would play again
Seems inspired by bubble bobble... but its still being its own game and better than bubble bobble too!
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