I thought I'd upload this because I doubt I'll be able to finish it - at least as a Pico-8 game. Basically it was too ambitious and I ran out of space. Maybe I'll port it to Picotron someday, but for now it's basically a tech demo.
You wake up in an android body in a factory in a mining town on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. You have to solve the mystery of who you are and what happened, and maybe how you can put things right.
Or at least you would if the game was finished. For now there's a little puzzle about exiting the factory, and some dialog sequences. After that there's a car to drive, a slightly glitchy plane to fly and some empty buildings you can look inside.
It's intended to be a game about exploration and dialog.
Controls:
- Arrows/mouse to aim
- Controller 2 to move
- When the crosshair turns yellow you can press X to interact.
Or you can switch it to single controller mode in the pause menu. (You can't strafe or look up/down, but that's not essential for this type of game.)
Incredible, reminds me of Marathon but with even better tech (angled surfaces). Very impressive!
Impressive and ambitious work! Just curious, were tokens the main limit you ran up against? I ask because most of the spritesheet and map memory appears to be unused.
Tokens mainly, from memory (it's been a while since I worked on it). I could barely squeeze the vehicle logic in, and I wanted to lay out the city buildings in a more organised way.
Also the cart containing the 3D models is already 60% full, so I can't add the variety of locations I was hoping for.
If I scaled back the aspirations a bit, maybe it could be turned into something.
It's a shame to leave it as an impressive demo.
BTW, do you mind if I steal your data[[ ]] string parser for my games ? Does it allow comments in the string ? I think Felice also had a cool one that could parse Lua array syntax, but I've lost it somehow.
About your demo,
You could use parens-8 for more tokens, and card chains for 47Kb extra of compressed data/code, if you have the spare CPU, maybe ?
Or maybe split the game map into many carts while keeping the game state in high memory ?
You're welcome to use the data[[]] routine.
It's essentially a CSV parser, so not a flexible as full lua table syntax. It does support references, there's a basic syntax for arrays, which is enough to get me by.
No comments though, unless you fudge it by making a "comment" column or something.
Thanks for the suggestions btw - although I think parens-8 is a bit further than I'd be prepared to go :-) (looks pretty cool though)
I think I saw this on retweeted Zep's feed, insane even if not finished seriously impressive
Even in a non finished state this is really impressive.
The rasterizer perf/quality is really something I'll dig into!
I understand the wearyness of the constant token fight (and you writing style is not super compact :) )
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