So I've made a few carts now, and am enjoying the hell out of it. Primarily for the joy of just building things, but also for the implicit little bit of roleplaying involved: I'm not just programming a game, I'm programming a game for a fictional console from another universe, from another time. I'm not just me, really; I'm the company that would have existed to be producing these things. I'm some scrappy no-budget third-party game dev concern from alternate universe 198X.
And a game company needs a brand identity.
And so: I came up with a name and drew a logo, and wrote up a little basically self-contained function to do a quick splash screen render, using a single 2*2 sprite:
The notion is, I can take this and paste it into any cart I release with just a little bit of futzing to make it the first thing the cart does on boot before moving onto normal game state stuff. At ~200 tokens its not as slim as it could be, but for most carts that won't be an issue and stripping it down to a simpler static splash would work in a pinch.
Anyway, it was fun to make, but beyond that I just like the idea, and I think it's be a great little community thing to see this idea adopted more generally. Sort of establish the odd little universe we've all opted into by adopting the constraints of PICO 8, fleshing out an ad hoc hodgepodge of fictional companies in a fictional market.
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can I recommend that any demos here restart the animation on btnp(z)? that could be used in the actual game carts to progress to the next scene, but for here makes it easier to rewatch.
Edit: @joshmillard, you can also reduce your token count by a lot by subtracting cx and cy from the camera (and removing the vars entirely, since they only get referenced in that one place).
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This seemed like a small enough challenge to get me to finally make a cartridge.
Full Disclosure, I kinda kept your overall style, cortex (and reused your basic code framework).
it was a neat little exercise to get me playing with sprites, (bite-sized) animations, sfx, and some of the basics of the update/draw functionality.
I'm not terribly attached to the logo or the silly "game company" name, but I can just pretend it's 198x and my little company needs some MARKETING HYPE and hired some game-dev wannabe off the street to whip up a Sweet Logo ASAP, and this is what was created (and likely only cost like 25 bucks)
EDIT: version 2 without the shaky shaky
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yeah this was fun to do :p
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I also had fun with this one. I'll have to add it to a real project soon :)
(animation is adapted from one I found online)
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I started to make mine.. and discovered the glory of FLIP()
Looking at some of the code for these, they look like they could be simpler using FLIP() to "post" instead of hooking into the _update() _draw() functions. It would also simplify pasting into other carts one makes.
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flip() shows whatever is in the back buffer and then waits for the next frame to start.
So, if you want to make an easily pasteable chunk of code (instead of having to modify both _update and _draw), you could do something like:
function do_intro() local i=0 while (btn() == 0) do cls() rect(0,i,127,i,7) i=(i+1)%128 flip() end end do_intro() -- could be called from anywhere |
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I couldn't resist. At roughly 270 tokens, this is way too big (and I only made a half a**ed attempt to optimize it), but it was a lot of fun creating it.
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yay sort of ocean noise
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I have this weird feeling I've seen a cursor turn into a door before. I should probably instead do some gnarly 80s chrome effect.
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while that logo is awesome - if the option is "gnarly 80s chrome" I think you know what the correct choice is
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You're right!
This is from when the company money is all going to cocaine and shoulder pads.
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See, we should be able to do cool stuff like this without being super using up code space. You see how big that silly SDG animation is??
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Here's my quick and dirty entry / experiment. 10 hipster points to the first one to recognize the logo.
Press 'A' to break things by loading a cart you don't have access to. Yay cartridge chaining.
EDIT: Orrrrr just reboot. Forgot that loads fail silently. :I
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Here is a splash screen I made for the upcoming 48 hour game programming competition, Ludum Dare (http://ludumdare.com/compo/)
I took out the sound because I'm not good at making sound effects
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Ha, that's a faboo joystick sprite.
I wish this Ludum Dare were literally any other weekend; I've been Some Day-ing LD for years now and finally feel like I have the right toolset now with Pico 8, but I'll be completely distracted visiting friends out of state.
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I think this is a great idea, and so i made a little something !
I'll try to add it to my next game !
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Yay, new logos! Dead Channel in particular hits a special spot for me.
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not a logo... but i made a quick and dirty tape loader.
Feel free to steal and abuse
ver 0.2:
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Just a little experiment in not using up sprite slots for the boot sequence. (TODO: Don't use up sfx slots either...)
It reads in the necessary sprites from a gigantic string instead. (Also, I wish you could type \n without having to use an external editor... I don't like my gigantic string all being on one line.)
I'm not entirely sure, but since my boot function is anonymous and all the variables are local to it, does that mean they also all get cleared out of Lua RAM once the function completes it's run? No need to waste tokens cleaning up, no leftover giant data strings clogging Lua RAM.
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Maybe this counts...naw.
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Here is my contrbution !
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This is the best splash screen.
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EDIT: Fixed an inaccuracy in the "rainbow additives" segment that made the animation appear too bright.
EDIT2: Fixed a minor delay inaccuracy that was twice as long as it should've been. Who would've thought this thing had such fine details?
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Agreed, and thank you very much for posting that.
Now to have some fake glitch fun >:3
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This thread is very cool :)
But how do I post my cart here? I tried "Submit" and "Preview" but I there's no option to send a cart :(
I know PICO-8 carts are just png files so I tried uploading one on the "Preview" using the "Insert image" option page but nothing happens.
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When you submit a cart, there's a BBC tag in the new post it generates for you.
Copy that, and you can post the thing anywhere on the BBC.
As for saving them, right click the icon on the player and click "save as"
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Hi, everyone!!
I want to start publishing Pico-8 cartridges. I'm learning how to code and develop with this awesome framework, its a little bit hard for me but I'm making progresses.
I published two games with GameMaker and this is my logo, i hope you like it!
:-)
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I'm some scrappy no-budget third-party game dev concern from alternate universe 198X.
You can now be alternate universe LJN.
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Last night, this made me wanting to recode a bit for Pico, but havning next to no imagination, I decided to redo something I did years ago.
With a little bit of context, this was the logo of a programming duo (and later a bigger group) I was part when I was doing C programming for Casio Fx-9860 series (graphical calculators). This was suppsoed to be our intro, but as we never succeeded into making a decent grayscale engine based on CPU timers (would crash all the time for unknown/undebugable reasons), we dropped it...
Edit : Oh, by the way, as the logo mockup I did 6 years ago, the binary stuff means something, pass it under an bin->ascii program! o/
Edit2 : Slightly smaller code (I suppose), less tokens used and a little optimization for the new version. Here's the previous one.
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I made a splash for a project I'm working on! Working on this gave me a little motivation to play around with Pico more often :)
I'll definitely play around with animations and such, but for now I'm keeping it simple! (especially because the project I'm doing could get complicated, so I don't want to risk wasting space on a big intro until I know I have the space to spare)
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been toying with ideas for a logo for quite a while and finally got this idea! probably need a little meowing sound fx and compress the sprite count but otherwise i'm happy :)
also been thinking about implementing something like scale2x to make the logo bigger (while keeping the sprite count low)
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catnipped: I put together a Scale2x/3x implementation a while ago but never released it. Just threw it up here
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Couldn't you use sspr() instead of manually scaling?
Edit: Oh, do you mean smart scaling? If so, never mind. :)
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My attempt:
Very slim on tokens thanks to Zep's tip, but maybe heavy on sprites?
Edit: The sound doesn't seem to come out quite right in the web player for some reason. Or maybe I just misheard at first? Not sure.
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will probably keep the old one, but this is what it looks like with scale 2x (only fattened the pixel font to get rid of some artifacts). will definitely use the algorithm for a full game some time :)
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