Pico-Janitor
You’re on the rescue! Your darling was kidnapped by some pesky bugs, and it’s your job to save her from her prison!
Goal
Clean the floor and squish bugs in this new arcade game!
With a points mode and a speedrun mode, adjust your tactics to improve your score.
Game modes
- Arcade: Play for the highest score, dashing through the levels before it's too late!
- Time: Play for the fastest time, adjusting your strategies to maximize movement over combat!
- Zen: Replay one level over and over, to rework the tactics to use in Arcade or Time mode!
Let me know what you all think!
This is my first PICO-8 game, so I'm new to this community!
Also, this cartridge is under the CC4-BY-NC-SA license, so feel free to edit it to your liking :)
One suggestion: persist the high scores and best level reached, so the player doesn’t need to start from scratch each time they play.
pretty cool not even as a first game, but as a game in general
I loved this. Great, original game. Feels very much like a classic 80s arcade game. Had a blast with arcade mode, next up, Time Mode! :)
I spent most of my first playthrough believing this was a demake of an old arcade game I'd never played before, you really captured that classic arcade gameplay and look.
This game's a lot of fun, so I've set up a speedrun leaderboard for it:
https://www.speedrun.com/Pico_Janitor
I've noticed a couple of bugs with the time mode (playing on the pico-8 client)—it doesn't save my best time, and it always shows the death counter as 0 deaths.
Thanks for playing, and for the feedbacks as well! I'll make sure to update the game as soon as I have time :)
Pico Janitor v1.1 is out!
Patch notes:
- Time Mode has major QoL changes to help the speedrun.com leaderboard
- Best Times are now saved at the end of the run
- Level transitions are faster to reduce waiting time
- Start jingles are removed
- Timer starts when any button is pressed in each level (you can keep yourself hydrated without the clock running)
- Zen Mode now has score and time shown, to improve tactics on how to reach high scores!
- Zen Mode levels, similarly to Time Mode, start only when you press any button
I couldn't figure out how to update the parent cartridge, and am not sure if this is the way I'm supposed to update it. If you have suggestions, please let me know.
Regardless, I hope you enjoy the update! :)
What a great cartridge. Love the feel of the player, the aesthetics, the speed at which levels are completed. I played the arcade mode and found I had more lives than I really knew what to do with - nice to see them given as a bonus at the end!
I love how a level can go from almost complete to total chaos if you let the enemies move around too much. I started to use a strategy of intentionally dying to give myself more time.
One criticism is that I only ever seemed to use the power-up of 2 brooms. I think I used "slow enemies" once but didn't seem to notice the effect as I cleared that level so quickly. Never needed extra lives.
Absolutely great game though. Is the idea original? If so what a great concept. If not, then you've implemented it really well here. I can see myself coming back to this game again and again
@phil Thank you very much for playing!
I get the feedback, and I can say it's intentional! All of the playtesters (who liked to play it safe) always picked slow bugs, while I can see others around prefer two brooms. This game is for anyone, so I tried to keep it on the easy side for casuals and rewarding and challenging for arcade fans.
When it comes to extra lives, I removed them from the bonus list in v1.1. I didn't know how to update the cartridge properly, and I just fixed it!
The game is my own interpretation of City Connection, mixed with some of arcade games I loved to play. I'm glad you liked the ideas :)
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