MagicChopstick [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Built On A Plane Jam: epock

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 04:53:57 UTC

mcg_epock

by MagicChopstick

[Click to Play]

Hello again, everyone!

So I was stuck on a plane from DC to San Francisco today, so I did what any rational person in that position would do: I threw a 1-person "build something nifty on a long plane ride" game jam!

My last jammy thing was qdlst(), the Quick 'n' Dirty Locally Similar Tiler algorithm that I subsequently used to build Greave, the dungeon crawler I released this past weekend. Today, for a change, I decided to try my hand at a worldmap builder in the vein of Civilization.

Being as I was on an airplane and was not about to shell out good money for lousy wifi, all I had to work with was PICO-8 and the text-based manual. Since I couldn't remember any perlin noise procedures off the top of my head, I had to improvise, which is more fun, anyhow. I decided to go the geological route: I'd build a world by pummeling a blank slate with a bunch of meteors. add a little random noise every ten rounds or so, and you've got yourself a planet!

The end result is surprisingly nifty and builds a cool 128x128 world map in a matter of seconds (toggle the real-time viz off by pressing the up button to see the algorithm work at full speed.) Use the left and right arrows to increase/decrease the number of meteor iterations the program goes through.

Greave 1.0

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 04:28:45 UTC

Greave 1.0

by MagicChopstick

[Click to Play]

Hello, everyone!

I've put together a little homage to one of the classics of the 1980's arcade scene, Gauntlet. It's only one player (boo!) but it introduces procedurally-generated levels using the Quick 'n' Dirty Locally Similar Tiler algorithm I put together a few months ago. Run around, kill baddies, get powerups and treasure, and slowly uncover the deep and complex story of why, exactly, you're doing all of this.

This is a 1.0 release, so it's feature complete, probably buggy here and there, needs optimization, and is really bumping up against the token count. 😬

Have fun, and let me know what you think!

qdlst(): a Quick 'n' Dirty Locally Similar Tiler

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 03:39:20 UTC

mcg_qdlst

by MagicChopstick

[Click to Play]

Recently, I've been futzing around with the wave function collapse algorithm. The original WFC is a titch heavy for PICO-8, so I've been experimenting with shortcuts and hacks to make something small and light enough to be practical in a PICO-8 game.

It's still quite early in development: it's optimized for readability, not compactness, there's probably more performance I can get out of it, and I'm pretty sure I have an off-by-one error lurking somewhere. All that said, it's giving interesting, useful results so far!

WIP: Spiffy Spaceguy

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 20:17:49 UTC

mcg_ssg

by MagicChopstick

[Click to Play]

Hello, everyone! This is my first PICO-8 game, started on an airplane with no wifi and finished as a fun little shmup toy while I was out of steam working on my main project.

Spiffy Spaceguy is an endless 80's-style side-scrolling shooter. Powerups will either switch your weapon type, power-up your current weapon (if you choose the same powerup style as the weapon you currently have,) or heal you. Different weapons have different strengths and weaknesses; play with all four to find your favorite!

While this is technically a work in progress, it's pretty complete. Have fun!

(PICO-8 is a delight to work with. I could see never going back to making larger games...)