Play above, search Splore for "helitack" or use LOAD #HELITACK from your PICO-8 commandline.
Only you can help...
Budgets are tight and staff is short so we're looking for volunteers to help keep our parks safe and beautiful.
Your job is to partol the park and rescue lost hikers and contain any forest fires that might get started. If you can keep things under control for 3 shifts, you can become a full-time helitack ranger.
Your helicopter is equipped with all the gear you need to get the job done. Stay focused, stay calm, and do your best.
We also recommend reading the handbook. It might just save a life.
How to play
This game supports gamepad and keyboard controls. Use the pause menu to check gamepad and controller mappings.
- Up/Down - Throttle; Forward/back
- Left/Right - Rotate direction
- Z - Switch modes
- X - Use selected mode
- P - Pause + Music toggle
Credits
- Design & code: Brian Vaughn, @morningtoast
- Music & sound: Brian Follick, @gnarcadevgm
- Art: Impbox, used assets from his game Tempest
- Additional art: Brian Vaughn
Play more of my games on Itch.io
This one was a little experiment to see if could make an entertaining game that didn't involve bullets, lol! I hesitate to call this an idle game but there's not always stuff flying in your face...you'll often have time to just chill in your helicopter. But for the most part, you'll need to stay on your toes and keep up with what's happening to succeed.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this one. I was happy to try something different and it turned out a nice middle ground like I had hoped. I started off with intent to be better at token management with this game but that went out the window pretty quickly...it's hard! This cart is at the limit but it could be refactored a lot to make room for something (including fixes).
I tried to learn some bucket mesh grid stuff but that didn't stick so I just went with good old fashioned looping. This game can probably hit its limit pretty quick but oh well. And I'm still not sure how to effectively handle randomness...so this game can easily go from overload to not enough quickly.
As noted in the credits, I cribbed a lot of the sprites from Tempest, an "original" PICO-8 game made by Impbox. I started off just using them as placeholders but they just looked so good I just kept them in. Maybe this is a sequel!? ;P
Please leave any feedback and or bug finds. I'll be putting this out on Itch soon too but wanted to put it through the BBS machine first to see what shakes out.
This is fun! I think I need to play it on my Gameforce instead of trying to fly with the tiny arrow keys on my laptop (and also hit Z when I mean to hit X - so much water I failed to pick up in a timely manner!)
I got an F every time, I think primarily because I failed to get to fires soon enough to put them out or cut trees down. I lost 33% of the trees each time. I think I can do better with a d-pad and game buttons though. I'll have to try that again later.
I didn't run into any glitches or bugs that I noticed & the controls feel pretty intuitive!
Thanks for giving it a play through. I hope you give it a try again and improve that grade ;P
But yes, it's a lot more comfortable with a gamepad or controller of some sort. I play with both while I'm making games but always lean into the gamepad feeling more because I just like it better.
I admit the game can sometimes throw you into the fray pretty quickly. A good tip is to clear the trees around a campfire when they're first reported. Any trees immediately adjacent to a campfire can catch fire (even diagonals).
whew, you said this is sort-of an idle game but I disagree! you need to be pretty active to stay on top! I felt a little cheated - my first shift was a C, but then my next shift (which i thought went better) was an F.
Very cool game! oretty deep, and there's a lot to do. I found that people would die VERY quickly, and I think this is what killed my grade. Also, it is not immediately intuitive that a campfire cannot be put out with water - this made sense once I started getting a feel for the game, but it was very strange at first.
Game looks and plays great though. And the music is super-catchy and appropriate! Really nice job, I like this a lot.
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