This is a classic style arcade shooter but RGB is about speed and accuracy rather than just shmup'ing destruction.
Match the color of your shot with the enemy color to increase score. Jump to different colored bars to change your shot color. There are bonus points for accuracy, not dying and speed.
Controls
Left/Right - Move your ship
Up/Down - Jump color bars
Z - Fires
This is my first real attempt at a Pico-8 game that has a future. This is just the first "demo" version right now. It only has 5 levels with no real satisfying ending or boss...that's all to come. There's some solid foundation to build upon so I hope to keep working and turn this into a nice little puzzle shooter.
Please leave feedback.
Todo List
- Some sort of music (anyone want to help?)
- Few more sounds
- More bullet patterns
- Boss levels
- Power-ups or extra lives
I've only been using Pico-8 for a couple weeks and RGB took me a little more than a week to get it to this point. This game helped me learn a lot, which means as I was building it, I discovered many things which lead to redoing a lot...probably could have gotten done sooner!
I also borrowed a lot from various carts, so some things might look familiar. Safe to say just about everyone that contributes to this forum has helped, so thank you all!
Just quick few things that I learned making this game...
- Palette switching is your friend
- Timing is a bitch
- Refactor, refactor, refactor
- I instinctively type () for every conditional and I don't need to
- Math is your friend
- Make scoring low because the limit is 32k
What a great game! Only 6 stars for this marvel, it's not enough ;)
I'm not generally very found of shump, but I enjoy galaga / space invader style, like your game. And this one has very interesting and creative additions, which make it very pleasant to play!
Well done, and also thank you for the collision "engine" (which I found elsewhere on this forum, from one of your replies), it's easy to use and understand, and I've managed to implement it in my own w.i.p.
Thanks for playing. I kind of left this game as a learning demo of sorts, since it was my first one. It's probably one I should go back and finish, give a proper ending and stuff.
Pretty every time I learn a new technique, I make a game with it and RGB was the first. Actually, although not documented well, the system in place lets you build your own levels pretty easily so you can make your own puzzle levels.
Can't wait to see you create!
Very nice, challenging right off the bat, learn-or-die self-tutoring required. I like it.
Some feedback on input:
I think there's enough input latency inherent in PICO-8 that you might want to emit the shots a little higher on the screen to compensate. Same shot speed, just a little bit of lag compensation, as if to say "I just realized you shot two frames ago, so I'm going to pretend you did."
Maybe one or two frames of acceleration on horizontal movement? This is probably really opinion-based. But it'd help with finer motions when I'm trying to sneak between two shots... the purely digital motion is tricky.
Also, if you do try acceleration, there's the case where the player needs to move quickly and holds down the move button, and then you can pretend they went straight to full speed and boost them to where they'd have been if you hadn't been accelerating them.
There's lots of niggling stuff like this when you deal with digital controls. It's why some retro games feel amazingly responsive and others feel klunky or difficult.
Can you tell I've had to deal with inputricacies (yes, I made up a word) a ton myself in the past? :)
Thanks. I'm still learning and figuring out things like acceleration and stuff. Right now my games are all just "direct" movement, +1/-1 pixel stuff. I'll have to look around at some others to see how they implement the acceleration...but I'd like to have something like that. If you have any links or snippets you can share, I'd appreciate it.
The level layouts all need tweaked and I plan too once I refactor things a bit. As it is, RGB is kinda one big demo with some decent potential. I think I can use a map-drawing method to create levels easier. I want to have a boss battle or two as well.
I think I might revisit this game sooner than later...all great feedback, thanks!
What a clever idea. I like having to put some real thought into shooting.
Seems a bit harsh to screw up and only shoot one object by the wrong color and you get no bonus at all. Other than that, I've had fun with this today.
Also love how the colors on the title screen don't match up with their letters!
Thanks for playing, glad you had some fun. This game was never really finished so there is a lot of room for improvement. I just finished up a game so maybe I'll revisit RGB and see if I can make it a complete experience.
A trick I'm using for the "score" thing is to just print "00" at the end; and have a little function that whenever the score increases, it does this thing where it prints a sequence of 9 numbers to make it look like it's counting up, like:
{19,28,37,46,55,64,73,82,91,00}
Now your 32k is 3.2m.
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