You can also play it on itch.io here!
CONTROLS
Arrows: Walk
Z/X: Rotate Camera
ABOUT
This is a short but sweet game about trekking through the woods to make a special delivery.
This was made over parts of October and December 2020 for the PICO-8 Advent Calendar 2020. It was a great excuse for me to finally dig into some of the newer PICO-8 features added since my last big project, particularly tline and oval drawing.
Special thanks to thattomhall for playtesting and freds72 for providing me his textured polygon function! (It is used with minor modifications for drawing various elements of the house.)
And if you'd like to follow my work, check out my Twitter: @Jusiv_
UPDATE 1/5/2021: By popular request I've added a checkpoint to the lake!
I did increase the difficulty of the end portion a little to compensate, but it should still be less punishing overall.
I really like this, although when I got to the lake I died. And died. And died. You get the idea... Great little game :)
@drakeblue Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!
Yeah the lake is a tricky patch but hey at least you reveal more of the path every time you fall in :P
Absolutely delightful, and the 3d effect is extremely impressive. Love it!
That was a fun little game! I thought it was going to end when he was lost in the snow. XD
@Mikesta Great to hear! :D
@eboatwright Well that wouldn't have been in the holiday spirit now would it? :P
@beepyeah Definitely! Honestly I'm kinda surprised this was the first I've seen, especially since tline has been out for a while at this point. I don't have plans yet but I wouldn't be opposed to experimenting more with it someday
What a beautiful little game! Gives me A Short Hike vibes. I really enjoyed it! Thank you for sharing.
@mac Aww, why thank you! A Short Hike was 100% an inspiration, especially for the aesthetic, so glad that came through!
Great little game! Love the art style and the camera movement mechanics.
man, alot of math went into the 3D rotation effect. Outstanding feat.
I was properly worried near the end of the game, that was an exciting and really well-executed surprise.
I really loved this! The trekking vibes are amazing and the pacing is so cool! The last bit part really made me go "Oh heck D:"
I think this technique of voxel display in pixels is called sprite-stacking. Haven't seen a sprite-stacking project of this size before tho! Beautiful game.
Oops, been a while since I responded to folks here!
@Pincel Why thank you!
@ChronoChill haha yeah, def one of the more technically complicated things I've done in PICO-8
@SandwichBlam Glad you liked it! :D
@luckshadow256 Thanks for playing!
@PixelMofo Thanks so much! Glad it worked so well!
@fluffygrass Great to hear! Thank you!
@MerpleLeaf Thanks!
@allenxch Nope, actually! Winterwood doesn't use any sprite stacking (which is where you construct 3D-looking objects by layering many sprites with a vertical offset). It instead uses a few different techniques, mostly based off of drawing sprites using tline as if they were quads. To get into more specifics:
- The house and most of its decor are entirely "true" 3D drawing
- The signs are a technique I call "thick planes" where I draw the sprite in vertical strips that are always 1px thick regardless of viewing angle (true 3D planes have no thickness)
- The trees are a hybrid of the "thick plane" approach (as 4 radial "slices") and just a simple green oval drawn under them at their base
- The player and NPCs are just simple normal PICO-8 sprites
- The ground is just the tilemap drawn rotated using tline
Thanks tho!
Excellent game! I've been lucky I guess since I finished it in something like 10 minutes. Loved the gradual fog effect and the 2.5D-ish env. The dog presence out from the foggy woods was awesome too. Bravo!
Signed up here just to express how utterly charmed I was by this little game. What a pleasant way to spend a few minutes. Thanks for making this!
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