Hello world!
I'd like to share my first game and first post here with the Pico 8 community. Neon Saucer is a vertically scrolling endless runner where you pilot a color-switching UFO up through Neon City. Match your color with gems to collect them, match your color with enemies to smash them. As you get higher, your ship goes faster, and you'll need to deal with trickier enemies and obstacles.
In short: Move fast and break stuff.
Postgame scoring is tracked for total height, total gems, successful enemy hits, and best banked combo. A combo of consecutive enemy smashes builds beneath your ship. The bottom of the screen shows the combo timer which is refilled with each successful enemy hit or gem pickup. A combo is lost if you hit a non-matching gem or the sides of the screen. A combo is completed once the timer runs out, or the player slows down. Completed combos award bonus gems for the amount of the combo, plus additional bonuses for every 10.
I've been having so much fun working on this game, and I'm pretty happy with its current state, though I still regard it as a work in progress for a couple of reasons:
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I'm sure the code is not as optimized as it could be, and I'm approaching the token limit.
- The game has had almost no outside playtesting, so I'm interested in any feedback.
Please give it a spin and let me know what you think!
Credit to the ever-generous, ever-talented @gruber_music for the music and sound effects.
EDIT v1.0: I've made my finishing touches and am releasing this as version 1.0.
EDIT v1.1: I've corrected an issue with the left/right bounds, added sound/animation for broken combos, and added a "secret" launch menu (press up, down, left, or right).
EDIT v1.2: Music/SFX credit added to @gruber_music as well as minor sfx adjustments
This is great. It plays smoothly, it's intuitive, and it gets steadily harder. I like the colour scheme too.
That is sooo cool. I love the intro and way the screen moves over to show the score at the end. Great presentation. And nice intuitive gameplay.
@Godmil Thanks for checking it out! That score sequence was one of the ways I was experimenting with the camera function, which is really helpful. Meanwhile, the parallax scrolling in the intro and main game doesn't use the camera at all, instead looping various map backgrounds at different multiples of the overall speed.
The ship position when colliding with the walls isn't symmetric. Right wall there's always a gap, left wall overlaps a couple of pixels.
good reuse of the Ikaruga concept (matching colors) and well done overall
@freds72 Thanks for checking it out! I’m honestly surprised I don’t see that Ikaruga mechanic more often elsewhere
it's super cool! maybe i'm just blind but also i'd like to see a greater indication of what color i am, seeing as i'm not staring directly at the ship, but seeing what's coming ahead and right now, the only indication is the ship and the lines at the bottom of the screen.
anyway i rant over i really love the graphics :)
@Ummmm_ok Thank you for playing! And good news, pressing up and a button on the launch screen will start the game in “VRBG Mode,” which will change out the city background with a grid of your current color, as used in the tutorial.
This is a fantastic game, the parallax, color and music really work well, but the simplicity of the controls coupled with the ever-progressing chaos is great! Great work!
@someguy17 and @gcoulby Thanks for playing and the kind words! Remember that you can slow down by pressing down!
Heyo, Marina, I do the interviews for the Pico-View magazine. Anyway that we can see abt an interview over discord? My tag is: Marina Makes#0142
Thx for your time.
Hi Marina! I've really enjoyed the work you've been doing with the Pico-View magazine and would be happy to talk more about the game. I've sent you a request via Discord as citizentrapp#3176.
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