This is my first PICO-8 game! It's an endless runner. I hope you enjoy it.
Controls:
- Up and down arrow keys to hop
- Buttons to speed up
Rescue eggs, and don't crash into anything.
Developer notes
My original idea was to create a one-button game, but it ultimately evolved into three buttons. I also originally intended to make a cowboy-themed game, but it was too difficult to animate horses so I went in a different direction.
Originally the game had a more elaborate design with "bosses" that needed to be chased or outrun, and some more complex rules around generating obstacles. In the end it felt clunky -- it made the code a lot messier but didn't make it more fun. In the end I stripped that stuff out and stuck with the simple plan of going fast and avoiding obstacles.
Reflections on using pico-8
- Overall it has been a ton of fun! I am excited to make another pico-8 game (after some other projects)
- This community is a great motivator. Seeing all of the cool games people make helped me get this to the finish line.
- I really like that pico-8 provides self-contained tools for code, graphics, music, etc. It takes me back to developing games in Macromedia Director and Flash in the early 00s.
- The platform limitations are mostly fine and definitely help to keep things in scope. The most frustrating limitation was the color palette - the game features a lot of earth tones which was sometimes hard to work out given the limited palette. Conversely, I like that the limited color palette means that it is easy to spot a p8 game.
- Using an external code editor helped me a lot - largely because of better typography, as well as making it easier to divide the code into modules.
- I never ran into the token limit, but it was a psychological barrier. I did some premature optimization early on to avoid it, which wasn't necessary.
- I did very little on the sfx and music side. It seemed difficult to make subtle sounds like bird footsteps on sand. I would like to go back and explore these features more, though I'm not musically inclined.
Pretty cool for your first game with Pico 8! I'm just at the beginner phase myself, so I can't give any real feedback on the coding side of things, but it's always great seeing people getting their first projects running and released to the world - so a big thumbs up for that!
Only had time for a quick run at the moment, got up to around 105mph (forget what my distance was), but I'll be back to see what I can do!
Nice start. Didn't really see a use to the accelerate key, so i kept it pressed, but since I had chosen the X key, I skipped the game over screen. Retried with the O key, played without any difficulty until I reached egg 20, at witch point speed increased suddenly by a lot and I crashed into something. So the difficulty curve is near flat for a long time followed by a wall with no warning.
Snakes feel lifeless, Having them scroll at a different rate than the background would fix that.
Great start! I love the different scrolling layers (background/foreground), they really contribute to the feeling of motion. The first time I saw a rock I took it for an egg :P – but it's obvious once you've seen an actual egg. I also like that you can choose if & when to accelerate – giving me more agency (instead of e.g. a fixed acceleration when picking up eggs). The difficulty was ramping up quite slowly, but that gave me more time to enjoy the graphics :)
This is cool, nice job! As a bird fan, I appreciate any and all good bird sprites, and your roadrunner is really nice! I also liked how you had objects at various foreground and background layers, made the world seem more engaging.
Like RealShadowCaster mentioned, the speed jump from 95 to 100 MPH was a little jarring, I got to 105 and crashed into a rock still trying to adjust my reflexes to the new speed. Regardless, this is fun to play and hopefully your first of many :).
Very nice! The sudden cactus blocking half of the screen is pretty annoying though. The sprites are all amazing. Like others have stated, the game is a little bit fast paced, but I guess that gives it some charm. The X key is a bit pointless though, since there is no reason to not just hold it down the entire time and it doesn't really do that much.
Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! I definitely have some stuff to work on here...
Awesome game! I thought the foreground was cool, and I liked the flashing eye animation when you run.
Great work, the gameplay is solid and I thought the parallax cacti in the foreground was a nice touch. That being said, I would have liked to see some kind of indication where each of the 3 vertical "lanes" end for accessibility - I lost my first few games to obstacles that I though weren't in my lane. It was pretty easy to figure out which lane the mud pits were in, but I found that the offset on the snake and rock sprites made figuring out which lane they were in slightly confusing as a new player. This might just be me though.
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