This is my first PICO-8 game! It's an endless runner. I hope you enjoy it.
Controls:
- Up and down arrow keys to hop
- Buttons to speed up
Rescue eggs, and don't crash into anything.
Developer notes
My original idea was to create a one-button game, but it ultimately evolved into three buttons. I also originally intended to make a cowboy-themed game, but it was too difficult to animate horses so I went in a different direction.
Originally the game had a more elaborate design with "bosses" that needed to be chased or outrun, and some more complex rules around generating obstacles. In the end it felt clunky -- it made the code a lot messier but didn't make it more fun. In the end I stripped that stuff out and stuck with the simple plan of going fast and avoiding obstacles.
Reflections on using pico-8
- Overall it has been a ton of fun! I am excited to make another pico-8 game (after some other projects)
- This community is a great motivator. Seeing all of the cool games people make helped me get this to the finish line.
- I really like that pico-8 provides self-contained tools for code, graphics, music, etc. It takes me back to developing games in Macromedia Director and Flash in the early 00s.
- The platform limitations are mostly fine and definitely help to keep things in scope. The most frustrating limitation was the color palette - the game features a lot of earth tones which was sometimes hard to work out given the limited palette. Conversely, I like that the limited color palette means that it is easy to spot a p8 game.
- Using an external code editor helped me a lot - largely because of better typography, as well as making it easier to divide the code into modules.
- I never ran into the token limit, but it was a psychological barrier. I did some premature optimization early on to avoid it, which wasn't necessary.
- I did very little on the sfx and music side. It seemed difficult to make subtle sounds like bird footsteps on sand. I would like to go back and explore these features more, though I'm not musically inclined.
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Pretty cool for your first game with Pico 8! I'm just at the beginner phase myself, so I can't give any real feedback on the coding side of things, but it's always great seeing people getting their first projects running and released to the world - so a big thumbs up for that!
Only had time for a quick run at the moment, got up to around 105mph (forget what my distance was), but I'll be back to see what I can do!
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Nice start. Didn't really see a use to the accelerate key, so i kept it pressed, but since I had chosen the X key, I skipped the game over screen. Retried with the O key, played without any difficulty until I reached egg 20, at witch point speed increased suddenly by a lot and I crashed into something. So the difficulty curve is near flat for a long time followed by a wall with no warning.
Snakes feel lifeless, Having them scroll at a different rate than the background would fix that.
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Great start! I love the different scrolling layers (background/foreground), they really contribute to the feeling of motion. The first time I saw a rock I took it for an egg :P – but it's obvious once you've seen an actual egg. I also like that you can choose if & when to accelerate – giving me more agency (instead of e.g. a fixed acceleration when picking up eggs). The difficulty was ramping up quite slowly, but that gave me more time to enjoy the graphics :)
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This is cool, nice job! As a bird fan, I appreciate any and all good bird sprites, and your roadrunner is really nice! I also liked how you had objects at various foreground and background layers, made the world seem more engaging.
Like RealShadowCaster mentioned, the speed jump from 95 to 100 MPH was a little jarring, I got to 105 and crashed into a rock still trying to adjust my reflexes to the new speed. Regardless, this is fun to play and hopefully your first of many :).
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Very nice! The sudden cactus blocking half of the screen is pretty annoying though. The sprites are all amazing. Like others have stated, the game is a little bit fast paced, but I guess that gives it some charm. The X key is a bit pointless though, since there is no reason to not just hold it down the entire time and it doesn't really do that much.
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Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! I definitely have some stuff to work on here...
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Awesome game! I thought the foreground was cool, and I liked the flashing eye animation when you run.
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Great work, the gameplay is solid and I thought the parallax cacti in the foreground was a nice touch. That being said, I would have liked to see some kind of indication where each of the 3 vertical "lanes" end for accessibility - I lost my first few games to obstacles that I though weren't in my lane. It was pretty easy to figure out which lane the mud pits were in, but I found that the offset on the snake and rock sprites made figuring out which lane they were in slightly confusing as a new player. This might just be me though.
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