"Imprisoned beneath the earth...only your wit, guile and a plasma pistol for company. However will you escape?"
Propulsion
25 levels of mind-bending physics-puzzle-platforming fun!
This is actually a remake of a Flash game I made back in 2011-2012, which you can play here. I even remade the original music in glorious 4-channel chiptune (I got the original music from the Newgrounds Audio Portal and it's since been deleted. Wish I could find the original artist!)
I made a post before about porting a physics library called bump to PICO-8; this is the first project I've made using it in earnest. I mentioned concerns in that thread about token pressure from including the library. In the end, the greatest strain on token count was representing levels in code (the game doesn't actually run while unminified); I had to get creative with string encoding and other tricks to make it all fit (8191/8192 tokens!). I wrote a pretty ropey python script for converting multiple Tiled tmx files into generated lua code (you can find the script here). I encoded the tiles as PICO-8-compatible hex strings (this meant that the data just needed to be copied into a reserved section of the map when loading a level); the rest was encoded as structures of entity types, co-ordinates and properties (e.g. switch colours, platform directions).
This is beautiful! Very satisfying to get your angle right and hit multiple targets with bounces. Also I know these are tiny details, but the little computer screens and the circular cross-fades between levels are both really gorgeous graphic touches!
> This is beautiful! Very satisfying to get your angle right and hit multiple targets with bounces. Also I know these are tiny details, but the little computer screens and the circular cross-fades between levels are both really gorgeous graphic touches!
Thanks for playing and for the kind words, I'm really glad you enjoyed it. I was really pleased with the circular fades, especially since they were actually very simple. They're just concentric circles of different fill patterns (largest outer circle has sparsest fill pattern while smallest inner circle is solid); search for drawTransition() in the source if you're curious!
I like it but my progress wasn't saved..
could you use sget() sset() to save data if you have enough space? (or maybe you are and I messed something up? IDK)
Other than that I really enjoyed it
EDIT: you do have cdata it's just that I somehow deleted mine?. nvm
> I like it but my progress wasn't saved..
> EDIT: you do have cdata it's just that I somehow deleted mine?. nvm
Yeah, that is weird. cartdata and dset/dget are used to save level data; I didn't have any problems with sava data retention during development, but please let me know if it happens again! (I actually don't know much about how web PICO-8 handles persistent storage; maybe it only persists as long as the browser is open or something?)
This is such a sweet game. I like the gentle melancholy vibe of the music, I'd happily listen to an album of this stuff. The difficulty ramps up nicely too.
> This is such a sweet game. I like the gentle melancholy vibe of the music, I'd happily listen to an album of this stuff. The difficulty ramps up nicely too.
Glad to hear the difficult increase works well; I did try to make it feel as natural as possible. Glad you enjoyed the music as well; wish I could find the original artist after all these years.
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