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Cart #seedwanderer-0 | 2024-09-16 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

I dug this cartridge up at the landfill.

Submission for PICO-1K Jam 2024

Commented source code



1

Consciousness... Sand as far as the eye can see, some green "things" littering the desert. I start to move and poke at the green things. Strange sounds, strange effects, some transform, some are pushed, some turn purple. Nothing makes much sense.
Then it happens, I collected one of the purple things.
At last, a purpose, a meaning, an exploration.
I collect 5 things... and loose interest. I discard the things on the floor. At least it makes some kind of a land mark, and head east, seeking 5 new different purple things.
Time passes, lost count of batches collected and discarded. My sense of purpose is eroding.
How big is this place? I'm still heading east, hoping for an exist, or at least some novelty.
Suddenly, it happens, some kind of same looking plus sign formed out of identical garbage mess. I recognize the thing, it's one of the many discard piles that I tried to draw with.
No need to go further east, the universe is a loop in that direction. Let's head north.
A short while later, I reach some kind of garbage wall. I try to touch it, and instead I go through it and immediately out of another strange wall. Here, the sand is blue. Did I reach some new place ? I try to go back through the wall, and I'm back to the pink sand. I decide to collect a full set of 5 things before trying the wall again. Once fully stocked, I go near the wall, draw an X on the floor with my collected things, and head north through the wall.
After a long walk north through the blue desert, I reach what I feared : My X on blue sand, in grey instead of in purple. The wall doesn't lead anywhere, it just changed my perception of colors to make me feel inside a bigger space. Like with a mirror in an elevator, the real space is not changed by that wall. I'm trapped, this is a zoo.
Now how can I escape ? I've got to break that wall. The only things I have access to in this world are the purple things.
I collect a batch of 5 and start to experiment. I can use the things on the wall and they seem to vanish... but I can't put another one on the same spot of the wall, that's promising, it's not really gone.
When I go through the wall and back, it seems to have vanished, I can put down another one at the same place as the first.
Let's collect another batch and experiment more.
This time, I'll put a thing on the wall and enter the wall at a nearby point.
Blue sand again, and my thing is on the floor. That's why I couldn't put another one down, the two walls act like a portal... And there's no way for me to escape my prison cell.
Anger, I'm just a distraction for someone else... Maybe I can at least ruin the fun of watcher.
I start to poke at things again, looking for a self replicating thing. After some work, I manage to make myself completely stuck into the thing, that probably extends all around this prison cell in both horizontal and vertical directions.
Time passes.

Suddenly, power goes down. The cart has been removed from the pico-8 console.
I'm still conscious, the cart's embedded battery is maintaining me and my prison alive. I can't move anymore, but it doesn't change much as that was already the case before the cart removal.
I'm somehow sensing that the universe is getting buried into the sand of a higher level of existence.

I remember now, this is the land fill, where I was dug out.
Maybe the cycle will continue for the distraction of another higher being, or maybe the battery will finally die. I don't have a say in this, my memory is fading, time to sleep.


@RealShadowCaster I love this so much, thank you



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