Hi guys,

thanks to pico's restrictions, I managed to finish my first-ever game, and I'm happy with the results.

However, I ended up using filthy trickstery to squeeze in as much content as possible, and as a result I ended up with a game needing several non-cartridge files to function. I'd like the feedback, but am not quite sure how to publish it on the forums. I could use some help with this.

The full game either #includes or load()s these files:

enemies.lua
game.p8
leveldata.p8l
peral.p8
shop.lua
translations.lua

Some of the files are generated by my editor, and others are just data kept outside the game for the sake of developer sanity.

How would I upload such a thing so that it would get embedded in a forum post? I could inline the #includes, but it will still need two carts, because the main cart is pushing both token and size limits (8142/8192 and 99.7 % respectively). And what's the proper way to link between same-game carts on the forums?

Oh, and here's a playable HTML export here proving that the concoction actually works.

You can use 'load' on the BBS to chain-load from a title cart to main meny to level 1 etc; each cart has the code, sprite, etc restrictions; there is a small loading delay.

Multicart (using 'reload') is not possible on the BBS.

Thanks, that's what I thought. Technically I can live with these restrictions.

But is there a clean way to preserve the file structure in BBS? Or is it customary to provide a separate github or similar repository for more complex projects, and just post a non-human-readable version of the cart in the forums?

People using splore will load your carts from the BBS fine.

For an offline version, you could provide a zip archive for example with all the carts in it, after replacing all load("#game-level1") by load("game-level1") so that pico8 looks for a local cart file instead of a BBS cart!

[edited] The load function does not cause any error if the cart is not found, so you can write code like this that will work everywhere:

-- for development, try loading P8 cart
load("level1.p8")
-- for players with downloaded carts
-- the leading dot is to make the cart not show up in splore
load(".game-level1.p8.png")
-- for players on the bbs
load("#game-level1")

For posterity, another thing (well, one of the issues) that popped up when doing this:

I was trying to #include binary data, but had encoding issues when manually inlining the files. Pico can resolve the inlines correctly this way:

1. Save the cart as a .png
2. Open the png cart and export it instead.

Regarding the LOAD() comments by @merwok above. You can also check STAT(102) and load either the #bbs ID or the local filename, without having to edit the code.

Very nice submarine game, @Phvli. I' recognizing that tune. Gruber's music goes good with just about everything. Gold star for you !