My first attempt at a Pico-8 game.
I didn't want to just make a game, I wanted to make a game that could be printed out in a magazine and copied as is. I had in mind the Compute! magazine that I use to learn programming when I was a kid.
I know about the Pico-8 BBS format, but for me that's like comparing binary machine code to BASIC in the old Compute! magazine. All graphics were made of DATA blocks back in the days, so that's what I aimed for.
Also, to keep the typing to a minimum I tried to have a map format that is semi-random, and the old Boulder Dash was a perfect take on that, so my game became a mini-Boulder Dash
So where is Dashy:
Controls: X to grab, Hold Z to explode. No life, but 100 points gets removed from the score when you die. The game is 12 levels, very short, so the score is used to give it some replayability.
100% of what is on screen is from code. I probably need to fix the button glyphs for this to be printable on paper. Nothing in the sprite editor or the map editor.
I do apologize for the lack of music though. I didn't crack that nut by code yet (or not in any form of code that wouldn't be just endless data entry)
2020-08-18: Where do we post updates? I fixed the winning screen to make more sense, and also to fix an actual bug. And I reformatted the code. I didn't realize how the Pico-8 editor would make my tabbing look so awful.
2020-08-21: I am still not sure if a blog post is required for a new version...
-Some bug fix.
-Sound added. Poking around allowed for a somewhat shortish way to make sfx.
-Changed the DATA handling based on the comment here. I should not have done it with bytes only.
-Added 3 new levels.
The glyphs are still a problem. After I replace them with whatever (I'm sure Pico-8 has keycodes) this game will have 16 levels, sound, title/win screen in 700 lines, with no other assets.
2020-08-21:
-Replaced the glyph by their values
-Added explosion sound
And that's it. The game is 100% printable.
Also, my highscore is 2641
neat!
do you know pico supports poke4 and full 32 bits hexa numbers.
8 pixels in a row can be expressed with a single number:
0x1234.5678
So eight of these numbers can create a full resolution 8x8 sprite!
I did not know that, thanks. I saw that dot thing in hex and I glossed over it thinking it was about fixed point math. In fact I wonder why I didn't even use 0x0000 now, only bytes, I think I got stuck on C64 Data's stuff.
This might help with the sound effect part! (also, neater sprites of course)
I love that this was written as a type-in game, but thank you for not actually making us type it in.
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