I think my game, Nybble Quest, might be feature complete. I still need to add more monsters, NPCs, loot, and the like, but all the features are there.
In the final release, there will be enough NPCs to explain what you need to do, but they're not there yet. So here's what the player needs to do:
- Find all the loot (currently 119), so you can bribe the guards to let you onto the dragon's island.
- Kill all the wee monsters (currently 9), which will award you with a gold sword. You need this because the normal sword can't hurt the dragon.
- Kill the dragon.
- Return to the king, who will abdicate.
- Sit on the throne.
Here's the full map, as it currently stands:
Already said it but I love the visuals.
I checked map and code and there's no use anywhere of the high memory and the current map is highly compressible.
This means the map could be extended and be 4 times bigger if you wanted. (up to 128x256 or 256x128, but a smaller size like a square 128x128 is also possible)
Feel free to ask if you are interested in the how.
Thanks again for the kind words.
I'd love to hear how, although I won't implement it in this particular game. (I really need to just finish it; there are other projects pending.)
As I mentioned way back in my first post, this is my first PICO-8 game, and I'm really limited to basic techniques. I'm delighted that I was able to make the map as big as it is, given that limitation. I'd love to know how to build a bigger one!
Is the basic idea caching compressed maps in high memory and swapping them in as needed?
You could absolutely have compressed data like map or sprites in the high memory, and that's actually what advanced games like the BBS version of POOM is doing, but the technical reason for it is the following : on BBS carts, you can't load data from another cart (cload/cstore is limited to self). What you can do it put things in the high memory and call another cart (the new cart replaces the old, nothing is retained on the LUA side). The high memory is not cleared, so you can chain carts so the final one of the chain has access to the 32K of high memory filled with compressed data. This 32K limitation is the reason why the BBS POOM is much shorter than the exported one that has many "data" cards read as needed as the player moves in the map.
What I was referring to is much simpler : edit your map parts in separate carts that have code that puts the compressed map into the clipboard.
Paste the compressed maps into the map of your game.
in _init(), uncompress the map into high memory, and poke the map address to be the high memory.
At this point, you have a bigger uncompressed map in high memory that works just like the regular one.
There's even another poke to change the map width up to 256.
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