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Cart #bharos_m_2minpicovania-5 | 2024-02-16 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License
10

2-minute picovania

This is a short little metroidvania, with several weapons, unlockable abilities (obviously), and character upgrades, packed into a small map.

hope you enjoy it - I sure enjoyed making it!

I am still learning pico-8 and there is so much more to learn. This cart taught me a ton, and especially the value of tokens. I ended up at 8175/8192 after cutting as much as I could, and skipping functionality I wanted to add. I realize that if I want to make bigger games, I have to be more aggressive with both serializing from strings, and also loading maps/logic from strings as well. Also, pixel art and music is incredibly difficult -_-

Update: Fixed a small bug that made the boss' HP bar go down too slow (only a visual bug, boss HP was working as intended).

10

Nice metroidvania. Took me way too long to figure out that hearts were mana potions and not health. That will teach me to read the in-game instructions before playing (who am I kidding, I'll never learn than ;p )

Regarding tokens, since your style of programming is object oriented, you could learn to (ab)use _env
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=49047

If the price of readability is not too high to pay for you, there's also a lot to gain by abusing how LUA treats booleans :
NIL is false, false is false, and EVERYTHING ELSE is true, including {}, 0, ""...
Consequences :

  • any missing property in an object can be used as already assigned to false (beware typos)
  • A function that doesn't return anything can be considered to return false since accessing the non existing return value will get you NIL.
  • A function that returns an object (even {}) can be considered to return true.

Example :

 
  function rs:draw()
        if abs(self.mx-player.mx) < 10 and abs(self.my-player.my) < 10 then
            create_object(self.id, self.fid, self.mx, self.my)
         return false
        end
        return true
    end

Could become

 
  function rs:draw()
        return not(
               abs(self.mx-player.mx) < 10 and
               abs(self.my-player.my) < 10 and 
               create_object(self.id, self.fid, self.mx, self.my))
    end

Here I'm (ab)using the returned object as a true value.
For that function, _env would save you even more ( self. everywhere)

If after that you still want more data, look for multi-cart game examples, and if it's more code you are after, check (parens-8)
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=135521
That turns your token hungry LUA into plain strings of Lisp code to be interpreted. (significant CPU tradeoff, so keep CPU heavy parts that runs every frame as LUA).

Nice short metroidvania. Took some time to figure out how to survive in this game but after I did that, I could complete this short game, with 92% completion.

Thanks for the tips RealShadowCaster, _env was really interesting, I can see it making some things a lot easier. Read the post and it gave me some ideas already!

But I also see just having to be a lot more careful with tokens in general. Opt out of some object-oriented stuff, use more serialisation, and just be smarter with my code.

And thanks for playing Bloodbane! :) I bet you missed the health pot (you have to backtrack to where you found the slide, after finding the super jump)



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