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I'm happy to announce my very first contribution to the Pico-8 community, which is a spin-off of Makiki's game title "A lone colony on a small planet".

Your goal now is to colonize an even smaller planet, but with some difficulties added to it. So this one is a more of a thinking game, while Makikis original is more of fast builder.

Credits:

Story:

"You have been given a mission. You need to purify a small planet, so we will be able to colonize it. It is rich in resources, so it shouldn't pose a big problem for you. We believe in your management skills. Good luck." -- Makiki

Controls:

  • O to build.
  • X is a multi tool.
    • build faster. you can keep it pressed and move around.
    • select what to build by using X over an existing building
    • get information about a building
    • change transport type
    • show the map and statistics

Cart #58904 | 2018-11-10 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Hint to get started: produce energy and connect the energy producer to quarries. Once powered, they start mining minerals.

More hints (spoiler):

  • you can build "transport" tiles to transport about everything: energy, coal and oil
  • prefer hydro plants over solar panels, they are cheaper. connect the hydro plants to your quarries with transport
  • building transportation is cheap. you can use them as a switch by removing a transport tile. It's possible to re-route energy that way.
  • activate the core by delivering coal and oil to it
  • once activated, it functions as the core of a purifier cluster. All purifiers adjacent to it work together.

Development details (spoiler):


I liked the setting of Makiki's game, so I invested 2 weeks into it to add features, tweak the game and learn about Pico-8 and Lua along the way.

Feature list:

  • random map generator (had to remove Makiki's hand drawn map, sadly)
  • producers of energy, coal and oil need to be connected to their producers
    • to get the path finding/validation to work took me ages. My very first experience with Lua though.
  • transport tiles to transport any goods over a larger distance
  • core works as a purifier cluster core.
    • I think this one is a nice idea, as it replaces late-game grinding with late-game "I need to rewire a few things". On the other hand, It's perfectly possible to win without activating and using the core, and I think it's both fun in their own ways.
  • lots of tweaks and balancing on the ui, controls and game elements
  • lots of memory and cpu optimization. I still ended up to reduce map size to prevent out of memory errors in the late game. Which actually results in a good game length. It finishes just before you need to start grinding. Thus the title "Colony on a tiny planet. ;)
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Fun! I would like to see more of this kind of thing on pico-8. I found a glitch, if you build the transport after the coal mine, sometimes it won't receive power. Also, what is oil, and how do I get it?

Glad to hear you're having some fun :)

To get oil, build an "oil extractor" on deep water. Note that "transport" transfers only one resource type at a time, color coded as yellow=electricity, brown=coal, blue=oil. You can switch the type of transport by using the X button while pointing on a transport tile on the map.

If you still can reproduce the glitch, let me know.



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