DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE

Hi! I present my first PICO-8 project. It's called CGA, and is an adaptation of John Langan's short story, Technicolor.

The limitation of 4 colors on screen at a time, but the freedom to change palettes immediately implanted the idea of using this story, for reasons that become apparent as the story goes on. It's really more of a visual novel in the most limiting sense, rather than a game per se. But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, as a way of getting my feet wet with PICO-8 development.

I have to add an extra special thanks to @dddaaannn for his text compression tool – un-abridged, I think the story would have been too long to fit on the cart without any code. I was able to use his tool to eke out the last bit of space necessary to make a cart. @Oli414's dialogue text box and @johanp's lowercase font was essential in making the long text easier to read.

Don’t know the story but looks like a cool implementation! Glad my font could be put to good use!

The story definitely reminded me of something I read when I was younger. The mood is excellent, well done!

Sometimes the dialogs contain series of xxxxxxxxxx, is that a bug?

I love it! Great use of text, images, and interactive pacing.

I'm glad the compression tool was useful. You've made more use of it than I have. :)

Yeah, the xxxxx thing is a bug. It was a really tricky one to solve because I was running up so hard against the compressed size limit.

The xxxx text is used for the student chatter; I think if you advance the text while they're talking, it won't remove the remaining placeholder text.

@johanp, I can't find your font cart.

Ah, but this does inspire me to fixup my book reader to handle lowercase at no cost to compression. I think I can do it ...

Congrats on finishing the September Spook jam! This one has big mood.

Ohh ... I see. Thanks, @greay.

You know a few weeks back I was pondering if it was possible to make a font that was 2-pixels across by 5 or so down. Seems like it can be done, at least for some of the characters.

Might have to do something interesting like this for my book reader, my own font of course.

Unfortunately, I had to hide this temporarily – while the author of the original story gave me his blessing for personal use, he wanted to run it by his agent regarding wider distribution.

I was hoping that it'd be a faster turnaround, but I don't want to rush it. I'll update as soon as I get a response!

Can always use my font, Greay.

I misunderstood. The story. Yeah, I can't help you with that. Now I am a bit of a writer and I've written several books in the past, but none along the subject matter here.

Here's hoping you get the green light for wider distribution of this unique story.

Beautiful graphics and soundtrack. I love the inventory system too. <3