Hi, friends!
I've just finished my first ever video game!
I just want to thank this entire community for existing and being so helpful and friendly. I discovered Pico-8 in April; at the peak of COVID-19 hitting my hometown, and in the depths of a massive depression brought on by isolation/lack of work/personal losses from the pandemic. It's been a lifelong dream to make a game, but I never thought I'd ever actually accomplish it, and making a little progress on this project each day feels like one of the few things that has really kept me going. So, thank you all!!!
Special thanks to @Liquidream for leading me here in the first place, and being kind enough to do some playtesting and providing lots of helpful feedback along the way. Also thanks to @MBoffin for their zine, which got me started, and for feedback in the forums when I was trying to figure out managing game state.
Also, I have a resprite with (better?) music up on itch.io:
https://ridgek.itch.io/killer-kegs
I think I'm here to stay! On to the next one!
I don't get the context but a game with kick-ass music and the enemy is storage containers? Perfection ^_^
@SmellyFishstiks Oh, right, lol! It's a joke based on the intro to the Star Trek: TNG episode, "Ethics", in which Worf faces his most powerful enemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBSSZgg_QvI Also, omg, thank you!!! :D
Hey @ridgekuhn,
You're very welcome.
Congrats on the (double 😲) release! 🥳🎉
As mentioned above - I was fortunate to get early access to this game and provide a few suggestions, but all the work was already done by @ridgekuhn, and what a great job you did! 👏
Hope to see what else you come up with in future (sounds like you've been bitten by the GameDev bug! 😉)
This is so, so well done. The pixel art, the gameplay, the music, everything. I cracked up at the "spine" being your health. 🤣🤣🤣 Nice work!
How did you get there title screen artwork into pico 8? Were you able to make it elsewhere and import it somehow?
Excellent game btw.
@MBoffin omg thank you so much!!! 😭😭😭
@Mikesta Thank you! I used this great little tool on GitHub, which converts an image to data and provides a draw function: https://github.com/nodepond/pic2pico/
The catches are: it eats up 16,384 characters; and the image has to be pre-prepared at 128x128 and already using the P8 palette. (It probably also consumes a lot of resources to draw, but I never output any stats for it since it seems to work okay for just the title screen.) Prepping the image is sorta quick in Photoshop, the workflow I came up with looks like:
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Crop the image to square aspect ratio at full resolution
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Lighten up levels and contrast a lot, color grade so the primaries (RGB/CMY) pop out, then oversaturate.
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Crush down to 128x128 using whatever resampling algorithm looks best
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Set image mode to indexed color using this custom color table I made, and apply whatever dithering algorithm looks best
- Re-paint the result as needed
Good luck! :)
@ridgekuhn - Great game, cool artwork and amazing music!
Well done!
@apLundell Thank you! :D
@spellcaster Thank you so much!!! btw, I'm definitely interested in your background images w/o tiles project! I mentioned a tool above which I used to draw the title screen for this, but it consumes 16,384 characters and is a bummer because it prevented me from storing Luadoc-like documentation inline. Looks like yours compresses the image? (I wish I could help with it, but Python isn't really in my stack. 😞)
I'd like to give it a try - can you send me the image, and I can post the code to render it.
I need to test it with a couple of more images anyway. And add a better command line interface.
Right now I have to change the code to change stuff (which blows) and I'd also like to see if I can get the character count down (although it should be way less than the 16k you mentioned already).
@spellcaster Thank you so much for offering, but I'm mostly interested for the future. I'm refactoring/decoupling the engine from the game this weekend; but other than that, I consider it done at this point, so I don't want to make you go through all that for nothing!
That's a good point.
I can clean up the python code a bit and put it on GitHub.
The actual pico 8 code is minimal, so adding it to your future projects should be easy.
@spellcaster I'll be grateful if you do! I've been a web developer for well over a decade, but Pico-8 and making this game have opened up whole new worlds for me and I feel curious about things I've never had too think too much about before, like bit level programming, image processing, etc. I'm sure I'd learn a lot from it!
@ridgekuhn
You can find the RLE encoder script and the fucntion to draw the RLE images here: https://github.com/iSpellcaster/pico8rle
Great work! Lovely charming pixel art, and high energy gameplay, not to mention a catchy tune!. Love seeing lil' Worf skidding around avoiding those barrels. It'd be great if you could see early where barrels were going to come in from the top of the screen sometimes as some seemed unavoidable. But loved the different barrel types being introduced, and the chaos upon death.
Well done!
@chowyunbrent Thanks so much! I think the gravitational constant is maybe a little too strong, or the spawn location needs a little adjusting. They never spawn directly on top of you, but they do spawn based on where you were a few frames earlier, rather than where u are now, which means that they totally “spawn” on top of you sometimes, lol! I’ll probably make an adjustment if I ever do an update release. In the meantime, if you keep an eye on the floor, the shadow appears as soon as the barrel is rendered, which gives u just enough time to hit the slide button to get out of the way. Anyway, thanks again for playing and for your kind words!
@ridgekuhn - oh, that's easy to fix. <Q-voice>all you need to do is to change the gravitational constant of the universe... um.. the game</Q-voice>
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