So I recently discovered Pico-8 and think it's great. I'm a hobbyist programmer at best but playing with Pico-8 has taken me back to my teen years messing about with basic and assembly on my C64 and Atari ST. I never managed to pull together a full game back then, and pretty much put any programming aspirations on hold for a long time except for the odd macro in excel.
Anyhoo... (deep breath) .. here's my first attempt at a Pico-8 game, very loosely inspired by the initial stage/state of a certain C64 game I was rather fond of.
Background: After returning colour to the world our hero retired to a peaceful house in the country. But... oh no!.. his lovely garden is under attack, and there's not a power-up in sight - so it's no lasers, just bouncing (and the cats gone missing!).
Gameplay: protect the flowers by bouncing into the nasties.
Left/Right to accelerate the ball in that direction (ie decelerate if travelling in the opposite direction)
There are four types of nasty:
Bugs - Nasty little beasts that eat the flowers. Dropped by birds.Harmless to the ball - just bash em! Different waves have more or less bugs. They flash on the radar when eating a flower... kill em quick.
Birds - fly about and have a chance of dropping a bug. Easy to kill, can't harm the ball.
Spikey birds (aka killer birds) - have swords for wings. Will hurt the ball if hit from above... so hit them from below. Also drop bugs.
Frogs (aka cyber frogs) - jump about on their powerful cyber-scissor back legs. Will hurt the ball if hit from below. Have a chance of 'snipping' and killing any flower they are landed on so try to splat them before they jump...
Lose points for dead flowers, score points for every nasty that's killed.
There are six waves which repeat over three levels. Extra life at level start.
Game over if all flowers are eaten or all lives lost.
I'm not sure how fun it is, now it's all done and dusted. Also not sure if too hard or too easy, so any feedback welcome.
Hope someone gets at least a modicum of enjoyment from it :)
Very fun little game but it would be cool to have a way to control yourself better like doing shorter or longer jumps.
This reminds me of Wizball for the C64. Are there plans for some powerups? Great game!
Nifty. I really dig the mini-map radar...gonna have to find out how to do one of those.
This is great! I treasure the home computer era vibe. I like the difficulty, takes skill and strategy, and tough to master, but not unfair.
I enjoy the simplicity of the controls, and the depth that comes from it. You have to play attention to wether you're moving up or down. And the sprites make things clear enough that it isn't unfair.
Thanks all for the kind comments :)
Chuffed that people get the wizball influence! Ironically back when I was first playing wizball I used to hate the bit before you got the stability powerups and where just bouncing around... I died so often... I really used to suck at videogames.
@morningtoast - I just had to include a radar as a nod to another of my 'favourite games I sucked at', defender. As it turned out it was fairly straight forward as I ended up having two x values for each enemy, one map relative for movement and one relative to the player/ball for drawing to screen. The radar just overdraws a couple of rectangles based on the map and screen width/height (one pixel on map = 8 real pixels ie one sprite/tile) then cycles through and plots a pixel for each enemy using the ball relative x. I would have liked to have the actual map drawn as well but couldn't figure out a simple/quick way of doing that...
[Please log in to post a comment]
