After working on this on and off for most of the year, I've finished my first PICO-8 game, Nybble Quest. It's a casual adventure game with a 4-bit aesthetic. It's designed to be cute and easy. Yes, you can die, but you probably won't unless you get cornered somewhere.
A couple years ago I was working through a top-down adventure tutorial for PICO-8. It was fun, but the 8x8 pixel tiles combined with the map size felt limiting. Early this year, I stumbled across a set of 4x4 pixel adventure game graphics called Micro Venture by an artist that goes by VEXED. That made me want to explore supporting (or rather faking) a map with 4x4 pixel map tiles. And it worked out pretty well, allowing for more map resolution as a trade for less sprite resolution. The source code has a link to that asset pack (and a list of which sprites are from it, thus not open sourced).
Music is from Gruber's Picotunes carts, both volumes. Again, links are in the source code.
One of the goals for the map was to provide some varied terrain, so here's a few screenshots.
Good. This game was relaxing. Here's strange dialog system, but i was attracted by this 4x4 tile size concept. It's seems no ordinary for pico-8.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! That dialog box is just telling you that you won and the game is over, but you can still wander around if you want. (NPCs will now say something appropriate to being king, but otherwise there's nothing new to do.)
I didn't want the game to force the player to stop playing just because they won.
The 4x4 tiles size does seem out of the ordinary for PICO-8 games. I hope some others try writing games like this one.
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