Banana Chase is a fast-paced arcade maze game or 'collect'em up' where you are Monty, a very hungry monkey. Eat your way through 28 levels of fruit-based action as you uncover the mystery of the magical forest.
•Chain together combos of fruit to get the most points.
•Don't eat mushrooms!
•Two difficulties, Easy and Hard.
•Five different types of fruit to eat.
•Three different enemies, learn the tricks and tactics to circumvent them.
•28 levels, explore the magic forest and complete the wizard's quest.
•Complete the game in the fastest time.
X - Advance chat, hide UI
Z - Level skip
This started off life as a very simple demo, and my first attempt at making a Pico-8 game. I didn't like leaving it unfinished, so I've been steadily adding to it on and off over the last few months.
I really admire speedrunning, so I tried to make this game as speedrun friendly as possible.
I didn't really have any particular inspiration in mind when making the game. I teach programming in schools with Scratch and it was kind of based on one of the games I make in that. It ended up kind of Pac-Man-esque, in that you collect things and are in a kind of maze, but that's a bit of a stretch.
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Old Versions
Version History
v3.01 - Fixed an issue with best times not being carried between games, added cartdata functionality to save best times between sessions.
v3.0 - It's four years later and I'm still fiddling around with this: Added a tutorial to explain how the hell scoring works; a sprite outline effect to make objects stand out better; particle effects because particle effects. This was all made possible by streamlining much of the code, no more tables as containers for variables. Probably some other changes I forgot about.
v2.1 - After some great feedback (thanks @jeb!) I've made some changes I was kicking myself for not thinking of.
•Added a walking animation for the monkey
•Added a third difficulty, so now there's Easy - 125pts per level, Normal - 250pts and Hard - 500pts. You can easily get through easy (pun intended) in under fifteen minutes.
•Made a bunch of minor adjustments to map layouts, there shouldn't be such a big difficulty spike in the mid-game now.
•Fruit should no longer appear directly adjacent to or on top of the monkey. Less broken streaks!
Hi, I made a similar game a while back but this game has taught me how I can make it a lot more fun to play. Thank you ❤️
Cool, glad it helped you. Yeah, my first version of Banana Chase was pretty similar to your hearts game.
I thought this game was quite cute. Didn't make it all the way to the end though.
Some tiny suggestions...
- Add some kind of perimeter protection around the player when spawning items. It was quite annoying losing a streak or hitting a mushroom just because it spawned right in front of you as you were walking.
- Change the artwork of the monkey to be slightly assymetric, and then flip it every step to make it look animated. I think it would add a lot
Good job!
::jeb - great suggestions. Animation is a bit of a blind spot of mine, so simple ideas like that are what I need. Getting fruit to place properly was an absolute nightmare, you're right though, it's annoying when items spawn like that.
Blessmyday are you joking? There's truly no way for you to lose the game. What are you doing?
@Blessmyday you can just tap the direction buttons rather than holding to move more precisely if you're picking up things by accident.
i enjoyed this game! famished monty is quite the hero, responsive and fun to move about. once i understood the fruit combo mechanic, the game really opened up and it almost like an action puzzler (especially when i finally got a pineapple!).
also, i had no idea it can take up to over a year for pineapples to achieve perfect ripeness.
and i agree with the wizard. i say yes too!
@anydayhappyday glad you enjoyed it. Yeah I wasn't sure of an easy way to get over the idea of the fruit combos, I didn't want to have loads of text in the game, and a proper tutorial mode would probably be really token-heavy, in the end I just put it in those tips on the title screen, but people might not read those. :)
results 2022-12-22
i played normal difficulty,
then i played hard difficulty
@Sosasees that should be fixed now in 3.01. The game now uses cartdata to save best times between sessions. :)
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