Enter a world of underwater caverns off the coast of an uninhabited island in my new PICO-8 metroidvania game, DIVER. Explore mysterious rooms and hidden passageways where you will come face-to-face with hungry aquatic creatures.
Note: This game is still somewhat in beta with a few minor bugs, but I may not go back to it anytime soon. It's fully playable til the end, just be resourceful with your ammunition!
Support the Game: https://dcdalrymple.itch.io/p8-diver
Source Code: https://github.com/dcooperdalrymple/p8-diver
This is great. I died several times, each time getting a better understanding of how to manage my health and harpoons.
Gold star for the clever air hose and the way you gradually increase the player's range. Did you create any level design tools to help tell you where people would run out of hose?
I agree that it's very playable if you want to move onto other projects, but I did suffer one bug where I got the hose hooked and couldn't unhook it.
I could probably have completed it from there, but the second time I took a screenshot, the whole browser tab froze.
On the next attempt I did escape, with 93 gold remaining. I did waste some in a few places, so I'm curious to see how much other people finish with.
On earlier runs I did occasionally move onto a screen and immediately collide with a fish that I had no chance to dodge. But I see it's possible to harpoon them from off the screen once you know where they are.
Hi Cowirrie! Yes, I am aware of the hose issues on the maze screen. It's due to some issues with the optimization on the hose logic. A big part of the reason that I stopped working on this is that I kept running into token limitations. Every hour of coding generally had to be supplemented with another hour of optimizing before I test the new code. So, I might let this one be.
The map was built by hand with lots of test playthroughs to ensure that item placement was optimal. I relied on the PICO-8 map editor and a few clever trips for most of the level design work.
I'm glad you liked it and gave it a few good attempts to make it to the finale! A checkpoint system of some sort would also be a big help to prevent too many replays... but I digress.
I played this multiple times and kept running out of hose and having to slowly stretch my way around the deeper parts of the map. Is this a glitch? Or have I just missed a pick up somewhere?
@MustacheEggman : When I completed it I stretched a couple of times when I suspected there was hose on the next screen. But I don't think it's ever essential. There are a lot of hidden areas, you can't afford to miss any. Here is the first:
@coopersnout : Thank you for the reply. Computational geometry is hard.
When it locked up, a checkpoint to restore to would have been nice. But otherwise I don't think it's particularly needed for this game. Games need checkpoints in places where making us replay things is just busywork. If level 1 of a platformer is an easy tutorial that takes 10 minutes to complete, and everyone starts level 2 with full health, dying on level 2 shouldn't make me replay level 1.
In Diver, once you know the rules and know the locations of the secrets, it's pretty fast to move around. Each time I died, I moved faster and conserved more harpoons from the very beginning.
The one thing I think would be neat would be if one or more of the pipe pickups accessed through getting the bombs were replaced by a destructible shortcut between the boat and the deeper areas. So you gain the ability to go further not through additional pipe, but by cutting out a few pieces of rock you otherwise have to wrap around. But it would be very hard to do this while making sure the overall accessible distance remained the same.
By the time you reach the lowest part of the map, is there any variable storing how many bends are in the air hose?
All of the hose lines are stored in an array and only the last three points are referenced for optimization. Technically, yes you could easily determine the total number of hose bends, but that wouldn't necessarily affect the gameplay. It mostly relies on the total length.
For those of you who are stuck and don't mind cheating too much, I've uploaded a walkthrough and commentary on my YT channel that you can use for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7dhu-N6-2o.
Nice game, @coopersnout ! I love the way your oxygen line wraps around the rocks. Incredible coding. Suggest you have EASY option where when you touch your boat you recover all Hitpoints.
Superb work here. Beautifully rendered and designed. Gold star !
OK I'm really playing this game now, @coopersnout. Noticed it is possible to get injured going from one screen to the next. In this case I left one screen arriving at the other and am immediately dead.
Suggest the player has invulnerability for 1-second (or more) leaving one screen to the next.
@Cowirrie Thank you for the help! I missed that and will be on the lookout for things like it.
Edit: finished the game! I loved playing it and didn't expect the ending at all, great stuff :)
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