Well after several hours later, I have managed to take "Mildew's Haunted House" and turn it into "Mildew's Manor."
In addition I have fixed the high-score saving by using CARTDATA() instead of CSTORE().
It is still of concern to me that current PICO-8 is limited now to 256-bytes whereas earlier versions allowed you to have up to 8192 using CSTORE().
A discussion for this can be found HERE:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31608
If you want to see animated screen shots and additional instructions for this game, there are 2 links:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27999
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27942
To see Haunted House initial animation cart (which is not used now), go HERE:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27925
If you have any questions about this game, feel free to let me know.
Now that I've finished all the tedious stuff and lab 
work, I can get to work on what I want to.
A good old-fashioned turn-based monster hunt game ! :D
That "rain" effect is gorgeous! :D
(Couldn't play the rest of the game for more than 30 secs due to the - all too effective - lightning flash, sorry!)
Oof yeah, atmospheric af but same, couldn't go more than a minute cause of flashing and I'm pretty desensitized to that stuff.
Glad you guys liked the ambience and rain, shame about the rest.
In any case I put this on ITCH years ago (where the RELOAD() and CSTORE() WERE working properly at the time), and I actually got some sales on people downloading the offline version.
Myself, I've managed to play on level 4 (cerebral, no time limit) and get all the way to the end.
If you're curious, this is loosely based on old Apple ][ game I found where the screen was LORES (40x40 pixels), and the "house" was already generated as a series of boxes. Meaning you would get the same layout each time.
The object of the game was to catch ghosts. There was no lightning or flickering, all the walls and everything was revealed - except what you were looking for.
Ghosts !
If you came close you would see WHITE pixels flicker in and out around where you were. You also had a chance of a solid non-flickering BAD ghost to appear - and he would make a beeline right for you - so you had to run !
If he catches you, you would lose one of your ghosts. If you had no ghosts, that would be YOU he would take.
Good game, except that the rooms were always in the same position, and that chewed on my brain as I was writing MM. Ultimately you see I wrote it so you get a different layout each time.
The "lightning" idea I got when I realized you could use PAL() in PICO to change colors.
Now I remember early work I did in QBasic 1.0 for the IBM where I would have lightning dash across the sky in a 320x200 256-color scrolling adventure game by drawing the lightning originally in about 3-4 colors from the total available.
Then simply light them up randomly and POW, you got what looked like really nice lightning appear as you ran across the field.
You could also scroll the palette to make a Kaleidoscope. Hmm ... I hadn't done that yet in PICO. Put that on the backburner.
And of course you could also scroll the palette to create interesting effects like movement of water, fire, green energy, or even glowing buttons. I remember drawing some laser rifles for a game of mine and had flashing and strobing miniature lights on them to show they were active.
Did the same for some walls and computer display tiles, like Star Trek.
With this, I realized I could do lightning. Now as fast as PICO is, today I realize only NOW that there was no need to modify the palette the way I did to get that good lightning effect. I could've just redrawn a custom screen each frame based on the wall positions and not use up any of the precious 16-colors.
You'll be happy to know my new pet project, a monster hunt, will not use any trickery of flickering in the palette during game-play - so NO headaches. Should be perfectly playable, but still challenging.
Hope to see you there. :)
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