Pico Door
Pico Door is a family-made game that took about a month to build (learning Lua and Pico 8 at the same time). I would like to thank my team (my kids) for the awesome pixel art, sound effects, and excellent ideas (and tricky debugging) that they contributed to this project. Much of the dialog and other text are references to many different games we play, movies we watch, and music we listen to. See if you can pick up on these. There are some inside jokes for the family in there, but should be entertaining for anyone else that plays this game.
The object of the game is to explore the map, avoid death, destroy things, collect all the upgrades (in the chests), interact with things, and defeat the huge door you'll see in the starting area.
Upgrades
- Health++ - Increases max HP and heals
- Damage++ - Increases shot damage
- Hat - Increases fire rate (it’s high noon)
- Glasses - Increases auto-target range
- Cake - Increases The Distance of shots
- Pogo - Shots bounce
- Earrings - Shots pierce
Movement
Since this is a roguelike, movement is done one tile at a time. you can rapidly press the same or different directions and the moves will be queued up - the player moves pretty quick so it’s very responsive (unless you just hold all directional buttons down at the same time for an extended period of time). Holding a direction will queue up movements based on how your input repeats presses when held, so it may continuously move or it might move once and after a delay move continuously. This game requires thought-out and deliberate moves to get the player to safe places, but there are some straight-always that, once you know the map, you’ll be able to just hold a direction (knowing how your particular input works when held) and not be surprised by the outcome.
Shooting
When you shoot, your shots will travel in the direction you last moved unless a targetable object is within range, in which case you will shoot at the target. You can find upgrades to increase your auto-target range, fire rate, and damage.
Enemies
- Eye - A green goo thing with one eye that does light ranged and melee damage, and is easy to kill
- Bug - A slow-moving blob that does medium melee damage and is a bit harder to kill
- Fang - A fast-moving snake head that does high melee damage is a bit harder to kill
- Skull - A fast-moving, unreasonably aggressive skull that does high melee and ranged damage
- Torch - A stationary torch that fires fire ;) - these can not be damaged and their projectiles are the only ones that can go through walls. Torches are only aggressive once you're on the lower parts of the map (you'll know).
Interactions
Anything that can be interacted with will have a blue X over it when you're close enough (and not currently busy)
- Mirror - Will show your current stats and additional info like how many doors you've destroyed, chests looted, and the number of enemies killed
- Vendor - This vendor is useless (after needing to recoup some tokens to finish the actual game)
- Moose - Will do different things in different situations
- Goblet of Grail - Will do different things in different situations
The Map
The rooms in the map can be traversed in any order and the enemies get harder the more upgrades you collect. So no matter what you decide to do first, by the end of your explorative loot fest, the enemies will be just as difficult.
Once you've collected ALL the upgrades you can successfully interact with the Goblet of Grail (without being insulted). This will get you to the final boss fight.
Achievements
Not spoiling how to get them
- FBI, open up!
- Annoyer of moose
- Neck problems
- No thanks
Difficulties
- Easy - Enemies don't scale as much as you collect upgrades and the game is much easier to beat than normal mode.
- Normal - The intended way to play - enemy scaling is based on a horrific spreadsheet with questionable formulas.
Repo
Nice, battle system is great. Movement could be improved : tapping directions works, but when you keep the keys pressed to move continuously, the pause after 1st new direction is often disastrous (stopping on spikes for example).
Gave it another go. using directional taps only and farming monsters instead of fleeing monsters when low on health was key. Boss was hectic, and I won more thanks to the generous drop frequency than thanks to skills. I'm a redneck annoyer from the FBI apparently.
Minor map design error, one of the rooms looks escapable to the left on multiple point, when only the lower point works due to walls on the adjacent screen. Since it's possible to arrive in that room from the right, a 1 tile shift would be welcome for better readability of the room. Two other minor annoyances : you can't pick up items during invisibility frames, and big hearts that you save for later because you are at full health rebox themselves when being offscreen and still need backtracking as they are needed for the goblet to work.
glad you got to do a full playthrough @RealShadowCaster. I noticed the issue with not being able to pick up the upgrades while “hurt” but I didn’t catch the map layout issue. Will be pushing an update with those minor fixes. Thanks again for trying it out and the feedback.
Nice short game! not fond with final boss design but it's gives good challenge nonetheless. I like the idea of collecting all powerups before being allowed to access the grail.
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