darabos [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

CPU Camp Game

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 16:42:55 UTC

My wife and I held a week-long "CPU Design Camp" for 10-year-olds. Turing Tumble, Spintronics, and Turing Complete were all fantastic teaching aids, but nothing came close to the popularity of PICO-8. Thanks a lot!

We built this cart together, mostly on the first and last days. The kids are responsible for the entire design and most of the graphics and music. I wrote the code while they were shouting feature requests at me non-stop. A surprisingly effective task management method!

The collision detection code that works nicely is based on Celeste ("move_x"/"move_y"). I should have copied the hitbox handling too because what I cooked up is a mess. 😅

The kids got to take the game home on an R36S:

I must show off our working CPU too:

Green Dog Panic

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 09:44:25 UTC

greendog2022

by darabos

[Click to Play]

For https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam-2022. Put your herding skills to the test by trying to chase a thousand people into the highlighted area as a giant green dog. Move with the mouse, click to bark.

Art & design by my kids.

LynxKite: The Interview

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 10:57:30 UTC

lynxkite_interview_20220218

by darabos

[Click to Play]

My first PICO-8 game! I've never even used Lua before, but it was a joy. I love how it takes away a lot of time sinks typical in game making. "What palette do I use?" "How do I store the images?" etc. I even enjoyed the built-in text editor for some reason. I will certainly make more carts!

I made the music using all 4 tracks. Now I wonder if this is a mistake? When I play sound effects over it they compete for the channels and it sounds glitchy. How is this usually handled? Use fewer tracks?