Over the last month I worked on a little Pikmin-inspired game for the 21st Eggplant Podcast game jam. What I ended up with is a fun little toy where you explore a level looking for three parts of a ship needed to escape a collapsing moon.
Ultimately I didn't end up delivering on a lot of the planned features or narrative that I had in mind, but I'm happy with the end result. I developed portions of the game live on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/kevinmakesgames) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@kevinmakesgames/streams). I regularly committed and pushed all of the project files to Github (https://github.com/kevinthompson/moonbreak-p8/) along the way.
I developed this in part as a test of the object-oriented approach I've been refining in PICO-8. In the end I still came pretty close to the token and compressed size limits so I still have work to do optimizing my OOP approach (or you know... admit defeat it and write more data/function-oriented code).
Short but very sweet, my 7 years old daughter loved it and was more interested in having more little robots than escaping.
She'd like to know why there's an eggplant in space.
Verbatim from her :"J'adore vraiment ce jeu, bravo!"
Translation : I really love this game, bravo !
This is real neat!
I liked getting all the bots I could and spamming them at packages to pick up lol. It was also cool setting some up carrying something then going far away to do some others stuff (I guess it's the same as Pikmin, haven't really played that much).
If you added a timer and some basic enemies it would be proper Pikmin. Maybe parts of the surface falling in so you need to be quick or something (tho I guess now you've got the game trimmed down so this is good as is).
Thanks for the feedback! I did originally plan to have the world be more dynamic, include enemies, additional bot types, etc. It was a little too ambitious for a project I only got to spend a few evenings on each week for a month. I did specifically label this version as the "Jam Edition" because I hope to revisit it and execute on my original vision once I can dedicate a little more time to it.
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Really nice artstyle and gameplay, especially for a Jam-Game. I specifically liked the aiming, which feels great, and the minimal yet charming bot animation. That tileset is great, the music is very fitting. I enjoyed not having time pressure, it added to the atmosphere.
Nice job!
I'm surprised at how well the controls work and how Pico-8's meager resolution isn't as much of an issue as I would have expected. It makes me even more puzzled about Nintendo making the super-watered-down 'Hey Pikmin! on the fairly capable 3DS. Seems there's potential for more graphical detail and game complexity on top of the solid base you have here, I look forward to seeing the more complete version.
This is wonderful. For me it hits it sweet spot in gameplay. It's so fun throwing those little bots all over the place and letting them work. And the auto0pathing for the bots is great, very impressive. Although I wanted so much to be able to use the bots to pick up my dude and carry him for a little bit, over some of those rivers. Only bummer was when I discovered it's a fixed map and doesn't change each play through. Great job! Inpsiring.
Great game, so fun and refined!
I didn't expect that collecting drones and deploying them would be as satisfying as it was.
Also, the cursor is so smooth, I tried implementing a similar cursor in the past, but it was so clunky and ended up scrapping the whole mechanic; so congrats on a job well done!
If you get to expand on the concept I would love to see what comes out of it
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