Update:
Finally fixed the map issue from changes in Pico8 and fixed the 10 minute game freeze bug.
Some dialog stuff and fixed a bunch of bugs, cabins now work and there are caves you can rest in.
How to survive your first day:
- When you wash up you're nearly dead, hungry, tired, and exhausted.
- Your health will drop if any statuses (hungry,tired,exhausted,cold) are in the red.
- Resting while your statuses are ok will restore health
- Quickly drink some water from your flask. (x -> items -> flask -> drink)
- Find some fruit/berries and pick them then eat them.
- Salvage wood from your boat, and chop down another tree and get the logs
- Build a shelter, eat, drink and rest, stay warm
- After this, focus on finding freshwater (it has white sparkles) so you can drink and fill your flask
- Then try and find some stone and build a cabin which will replenish your stamina fully
- Build bridges to new areas
Features:
- Day night cycle
- Weather
- Temperature (it's colder at night and when it's raining, stay warm in your shelter/cottage)
- Simple menu system
- Procedurally generated world
- Bridge building
- Building wells that fill with water when it rains
- Plants grows overnight while you're resting
- In progress
- Farms and farming
Plans
- Fishing minigame
- Wild animals and fences to keep safe
- Disallow some stuff at night to incentivise you to work during the day
I suspect code size optimisation will be quite critical =\
start of random map generator! implemented simplex noise.
basic inventory stuff and more menu work.
5512/8192...
Oh wow this looks incredible, this looks so incredible. I don't even know what to say.
Thanks guys! :3 I think i'm being a bit too ambitious for my first project, but it's pretty fun!
Looks really great - exciting to see how this turns out. Also how you cope with the code/memory constraints!
switched to using a perlin noise generator and generating my own permutations rather than hard coding to save code size.
it now generates nice islands and finds one with enough land and trees and stone for you to start on.
6265/8192
Added fringe tiles which make things look heaps nicer, using the same fringes for sand as for grass and just recolour them via pal.
I generate the fringes once at the start of the game and cache them.
Added new intro and death sequences.
I've basically run out of code space now. 8153/8192.
Hopefully I can do a little more optimisation to make the game a little more complete
with a reduced scope.
Personally I think doubling the token limit would be great.
Oh man, this is really great. And that blocky pixel title screen on the lower half of the loading screen is really awesome.
haha, this is so hard to survive. but I love it. very impressive scope!
Really good, but I was unable to build a bridge anywhere, even with the materials. Also, tree stumps stopped you from building anything on top of them, which didn't feel right to me.
By the way, if you're having trouble with the token limit, there are ways to get around it. Strings of any length count as one token, it seems...
@innomin sorry about that, the bridge building is currently broken =( i'll try and fix that for the next release. and yeah, i should allow building on stumps. i'll see if i can optimise the size more to fit more in.
@Mozz indeed, i wanted to give it that retro game difficulty =)
once you find freshwater it's pretty easy though. it'll also be easier once farms and wells are working.
maybe add some wild animals to make fences useful and also be a source of food.
- new update fixes bridge building and allows building over stumps.
- improved the menus, it now merges job types together.
- added air and body temperature, stay warm at night in your shelter
- plants and fruit randomly grow back overnight while you're resting
- basic shelter only replenishes a bit of your stamina, build a cottage to
restore it all.
I made a cabin and got to lots of food and I wanted to try traveling but there's no fresh water down at the south* end of the island... I got my bars full and tried to build a Well and I died because he had to keep building a Well in the cold and would not stop to rest. It was sad.
EDIT: Spelling.
Sorry to hear that Connorses! =(
I really need to make jobs cancellable and resumable.
I think death also needs to be more dramatic.
building a well no matter when, means game over.
I really like this!
building wells shouldn't be quite so bad now, but i still haven't really tested them much. thanks for playing!
I like what you've done with the graphics. Cabins don't seem to do anything at the moment, I built like three of them and they don't allow rest. I rest in my shelter and eat fruit. I'm worried I need protein so hopefully there will be room to code animals. xD
I can confirm that cabins do nothing. They seem to be Grass tiles disguised as houses. Maybe you forgot
to change "Cottage" to "Cabin" in some lines of code?
I managed to build a well and survive, but they don't seem to do anything.
You've got a lot of work to do :P
1 little bug on the code.
1 little bug on the code.
take it down, patch it around.
3 little bugs on the code.
yep! this is what happens when you release at 4am without testing thoroughly =) sorry about that!
I hope i can manage to fit some animals in!
This is possibly the best little game I've played for the PICO. Great work!
aww thanks! <3 i don't know it's much of a game yet, there's not much to do once you survive the first couple of days.
need to find some code space to add in some more content, maybe with an end goal of building a boat to get off the island.
but that requires exploring everywhere to find the required resources.
Naturally, it reminds me of the old versions of Minecraft. It was fun for a while but eventually they had to add optional, long-term goals to hold peoples' interest.
The new dialogue is very cool, by the way.
ZX and Arrow keys didn't work on day 12. Sound and statuses however, kept depleting.
hmm very strange!! I don't think I ever made it to day 12... not sure why that would happen! Thanks for the bug report!
I got to day 9 and suddenly I lost control and watched my little character just stand there and die. Had so much fun that I decided to play through again and got to day 12 and it happened again :(
This one bug aside, this game is awesome. The look and feel of it takes me back to a mix between Ghost Lion and Startropics. the feeling of it when the game just beings and you're kind of lost and everything kills you. love it.
looks like this bug is a big problem! i'll try and get to the bottom of it! =(
i've never heard of those games before but gosh they look similar! =)
Great games.
Regarding the bug, I am playing on a laptop and it may be a system bug from tapping the trackpad accidently while using the z/x buttons. It seems that if the game area is right clicked while giving an input the controls freeze up and do not recover.
ok, forget that last comment. I went through again and it happened on day 10 this time, I made sure to stay away from the track pad. It seemed to happen after creating my 3rd or 4th cabin. I left the cabin after resting til morning to collect a lot of wood I didn't have room for before building and got the message that I didn't have space for the wood even though I had just built a cabin and should have had a lot more space. After getting that message i moved back to the cabin and tried to open my menu, and that's when I lost control and watched my little character lose all hope and just stand there waiting to die. It's like she just gives up.
awww.... depression from being alone so long.. it's a feature? I guess? i'll try and fix it =) and also add new features soon!
joshmillard wisely pointed out that it's probably the time counter overflowing and causing weirdness. I'll have to separate the day number from the time within a day.
interesting!
Had the same bug at day 10, and sometimes I can't build but I don't know why. Even if I got the resources
you can only build in certain locations (not on sand or rock), i need to make it more clear why in the interface.
Great survival game! I finally managed to survive first night, then built cabin, well started exploring islands but then I got stuck on bridge and died of starvation :'(
sounds like you hit the day 10 bug =( need to fix that!
it's to do with a comparison and a counter overflowing.
I really like the game! Compelling, difficult, and fun! I had a lot of problems hitting the wrong button in the menus, though. The controls didn't seem consistent. Re-working them to be more straightforward would really improve the game, because I died very frequently because I couldn't make the right selection several times in row.
I love this game, it's like don't starve but much harder. If you're planning on continuing it I'd use farming to add a blanket to protect from the cold. Also it seems a little unreasonable that you would be starving once you woke up but that may just be me. I would love the idea of being able to make a boat that would have a chance of either taking you to another island, or maybe a mainland. My favorite parts of the game are the tiles with the random fringed edges and the title screen. Both are works of art. Good luck on continued development.
@CKH4 thanks very much!!
Yes I hope to continue working on it soon!
It's definitely too hard at the start right now, not very fair at all.
I plan to add farming, fire and boat making if I can find token space =)
I hope you continue working on this game! I got trapped and died from the Day 10 bug, unfortunately, but roaming around exploring is good fun. The graphics are super cute, too!
Once I spawned in on a small island with enough resources to build a cabin but not a well. Thankfully there was 1 square of fresh water available. But, the other land was too far away to build a bridge to get off the island - the player character would need a boat :)
Thanks gerbilfat!
The new token counting in 0.1.6 should allow me to extend the game further =) I'll get back to it soon!
A little more leeway when you begin will take this game far. Out of 10 starts, 8 failed in the first night because making shelter and getting food (one or the other) were both too out-of-reach of the starting location. Once you get past that, it's pretty solid.
@TonyTheTGR yep, it's very unbalanced so far, the start is too hard then it gets too easy once you get up and running.
Need to figure out a good way to keep it interesting and challenging.
Anyone play this on 1.8 yet? I'm loading it in the Pico8 client and the sprites are all messed up. They have lines on them and stuff...very unplayable.
interesting!
Tempest is taking advantage of a "bug"? in earlier versions of pico8 where mset() in the shared section of the tilemap didn't change the spritesheet data.
I suspect related to:
- Fixed: mset()'d changes in shared memory not readable via peek() / sget()
Getting a lot of garbage for graphics.
Have you tried this in SPLORE and Online in Firefox ?
it seems it's not compatible with pico version 0.1.8
I don't know if it's possible to fix this.
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