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Controls
- Navigate the world and UI: Arrow keys/d-pad
- Interact the world and UI: X key/X button (Both Pico-8 buttons work)
How To Play
- Go out and gather samples from your surroundings
- Research samples in the lab to unlock and upgrade abilities
- The game saves everything automatically!
Post Mortem
This post mortem is mostly me documenting the development of SPHONGOS and sharing some of my learnings. If there is anything specific you would like to know, just ask!
Contact
- Check out my games: https://mkoloch.itch.io
- Say hi on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@michaelkoloch
- Say hey on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/michaelkoloch.bsky.social
Just starting out but I already love this. Excellent progression, great-looking UI, intuitive but complex, with a nice little narrative and a world begging to be explored.
Great-looking game with a solid explore/harvest/upgrade loop. It's a little on the grindy side but in the end it wasn't too bad. It's also easy to pick up and figure out what to do and where to go next. Looks like your playtesting paid off!
Great game! Loved the visuals and the game feel.
I also really enjoyed reading the post mortem you've made, it was inspiring and informative. Thank you.
Great game! Perfect balance of resources and progression. Just love the mining tool - got some no man’s sky vibes 😉
@0oskar said most of what I'd like to say about this game. Gorgeous work on all the little interface details. I never died, yet I still felt very tense every time I ran home with less than 10 oxygen remaining. Gold star.
cool game but confusing.
I got to the point of needing stone(quartz?) to upgrade but it's not clear how to collect it. my "tool is insufficient" and the next upgrade requires a material it can't collect?
Hey @zomgwaffles, thanks for playing and taking time to write feedback!
There is an upgrade for the blaster that lets you collect stone. You should be able to unlock it if you found a few other samples.
I'll admit it is very easy to miss and not properly hinted at.
Thanks for the reply! I didn't notice that there were more upgrades at the end of the line that were letters instead of squares. I got to the end!
yo, just popping in to say that i love this game. Absolutely nailed the aesthetics and sounds <3
Just to check is this the ending?
This was absolutely excellent. I truly enjoyed this. The sound design was amazing, too!
It's a good game but gets boring after you keep nearly running out of oxygen.
This game was a great way to just kinda...chill. Like a gardener, just go out and tend to things, never quite sure exactly what will come of things.
This is a perfect example of a "simple" PICO-8 game that isn't simple at all.
I really hope there is a sequel to continue the story.
@pizzagame321 I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mind describing a bit more what you find boring? Thanks for the feedback. Anything helps :)
@morningtoast I really want to make a sequel at some point. I have a bunch of ideas and a direction I would like to take it. What would you like to see in a sequel?
First off, just continuing the story :) But I think expanding the discoverability of new things would be fun. I really enjoyed the excitement of "oh there's something new" when I was wandering around the map. I'm almost hesitant to suggest some sort of other character to interact with since the one-man isolation aspect came off so well...but...I think some other interaction points beyond the home base would open up some possibilities.
Lowkey should make a sequel where you escape and confront the scientist.
Honestly, PICO-8 game of the year candidate already, it has been such a long time since I was pulled into the atmosphere of a game. I really liked everything you had in here, IF I had to say something, the ending could be missed, if the player forgets about the log computer (such as my dumb face did). Otherwise, amazing game, looking forward to your creations!
@Achie72 thanks for taking the time to record this!!! Can't wait to watch it first thing tomorrow :)
Anton was a xenobiologist specialized in fungi study. After three decades of meticulous analysis, he had to admit he had discovered exactly nothing of use to humanity. Temperatures on earth had kept rising during the last two decades, and earth's fauna and flora was now essentially extinct. Luckily, in the mean time, some of his colleagues managed to create some lichens from earth plants and alien fungus. This improbable alliance was striving on earth, getting it's energy from the strong ultraviolet rays that was frying the remains of earth's vegetation, and provided humanity with an abundant source of food, if lacking of many necessary vitamins and other nutriments.
When his boss offered him the opportunity to go to the Sphongos asteroid where space drones detected an abundance of fungi and plant life despite conditions of radioactivity and temperatures far worse than on earth, he was very tempted to at last get a significant chance at making things better, but had always worked indoors and didn't fancy himself an explorer at all.
The presence in the ship's equipment of a faster than light communicator and a very top of the line regenerator finished to convince him.
Work on Sphongos was hard. The absolute loneliness was maddening after a couple years, and the process of getting regenerated from a near suffocated state was painful and traumatic.
Work was also very disappointing, intellectually. Aside from finding the new fungi in the hostile environment , getting it scanned, and send the data to earth, he had no material available to do any research himself at all.
Because the quantum communicator used a good chunk of the paired particles who's sisters where waiting on earth each time the device was used, communications was reserved for science data exchange. After submitting the data about the bizzar fungus, he got a "thank you, that's what we needed, sorry but you are stranded here" message, followed by silence.
Three years later, still no news. At first, he dutifully upgraded everything he could in the base, hoping against all odds that he might find a way to make fuel for his return trip in the end. After that, he stockpiled resources,hoping they might be of use to a rescue team. Then, he focused on stockpiling the bizzar fungus that was the reason for the entire expedition. Hopefully, the stock might be valuable enough to convince Earth to fund a rescue expedition ? Strangely enough, the computer's inventory seemed to malfunction and never listed the stock of bizzar. With nothing better to do, Anton painstakingly dismantled the entire storage system, added sensors wherever he could, and put everything back together, dumbfounded about where the missing stock could be. After that, he entered materials one by one and followed the trail of activated sensors.
To his horror, the fungi was directed to a small door-less room at the back of the station instead of to an underground storage like the rest. The tiny volume of the room didn't match the volume of supposedly stored fungi.
Thanks to a makeshift metal ladder, Anton reached the room from the station's ceiling.
The "room" was barren, half full of decomposed fungi. After lots of cleaning, Anton located the valve where the fungi arrived from, saw a half melted pipe on the floor that used carry the fungus, and a burnt floor, characteristic of the burnt fuel due to the take-off of a small sized space drone.
Alarmed and wanting answers, Anton spend the following weeks trying to override the communicator and ask for answers, precious paired particles be dammed.
His conclusions sickened him : there never was a communicator on the ship. He was talking to an onboard AI the whole time. Once the needed samples loaded on the space drone, the drone took off to Earth, and the AI just shut down, it's mission accomplished.
Anton's name would probably be added to the long list of lost space heroes. How many like him were hopelessly stranded across the known galaxy, he wondered. His samples may or may not be of value to humanity, he would never get to study them, and would never know.
With a mix of sadness, rage and resignation, Anton fired at the regenerator, until it was completly melted.
More out of habit than by necessity, he put his back-pack on, his suit, and went outside. Once at the lake, he admired the view and the fibrous plants bordering the lake. He remembered his enthusiasm at finding them. A sample of the plant was probably in the drone currently heading to Earth.
Anton tranquilly unloaded his back-pack: A full load of blue fungus, and a full load of iron. These resources used to feel precious, but now were meaningless. Last but not least, he unloaded nine bizzar fungi. That was the harvest of three weeks of grueling work, the reason for his coming to this space rock... and ultimately as meaningless as the rest. While admiring the view for the last time, he felt the now usual pain of oxygen rarefaction. His vision darkening, his last thought was that at least, this time, he wouldn't have to suffer the regeneration.
@RealShadowCaster THIS IS AMAZING! It's the first time I see something like fan fiction for one of my games. This makes me so happy :.)
I love the twist with the drone. Makes it spicy.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write and post this!
@mkoloch, glad you liked it. Much darker than what I usually write, but the abrupt stranded non ending set the tone.
I tried to incorporate and rationalize all the game-play quirks into the narrative. There's one I failed to incorporate : the fact that you are forced to pick up objects if possible.
As a game play mechanic, it's the norm and perfectly normal (as normal as standard keys that can unlock any door but are single use, for example), but you used it as a puzzle element and also as a way to make the inventory slots double as required progress steps.
Story wise, I couldn't find a rationale : is the player a robot programmed to pick up resources ? Doesn't fit well with the main oxygen based mechanic.
It still indirectly influenced the story :
I first thought about a positive ending where the explorer hero would be standing by the lake carrying the quartz, fibrous plant and bizzar fungus and would be picked up by a rescue team. The auto pick makes this impossible, so I searched for other possible carried inventory for the screenshot, and that lead to the more resource driven story. The resource grind became a central element of the story, witch retrospectively fits the game better.
Cool game and all, beat it and got all upgrades. But i might have made my friend kinda addicted. He's insisting on 100 percenting it and has gotten to 6500 or so of the blue mushrooms. Please tell me that 10k is the cap...
@xsaigez there do not appear to be any caps in the code. After collecting over 32767 the value will probably appear to roll over to -32768 and continue counting up from there.
Edit: just tested it and this is indeed what happens.
@xsaigez Yeah, I never expected anyone to even collect more than 99 mushrooms of one kind. The UI doesn't even support 3 digit numbers very well :D
I hope your friend enjoys it, but also takes care of themselves.
@kozm0naut integer overflow ruining your fun :D
What a great game! The world design and lore and progression all fit together nicely. The idea that you can keep playing after the end of the game is really innovative, and a perfect fit thematically.
Lovely game with great atmosphere and nice mechanics. Getting those upgrades really kept me engaged. I do feel there should be a more clear ending as a reward for all the grinding.
Wanted to write a followup question... how did you create and load in your cover
/ splash screen? It seems like such a simple task but you've done it beautifully and I can't seem to find anyone discussing the practice of creating these incredible game splash screens. Any advice on how to do this would be really appreciated.
@furious I'm assuming you mean the label. So I'm gonna write about that. Please tell me if you ment something else :D
this:
On the technical side:
I took screenshots of areas I liked in the game and exported the spritesheet to get the logo out. Then I used Photopea (web based Photoshop: https://www.photopea.com/, fuck Adobe) to put it together.
I looked up "label" in the pico-8 manual where I found that you can import and export images for various things. So I used the command IMPORT -L BLAH.PNG to load my image into the cart. https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#_Exporters_
On the design process:
Disclaimer: I have a background in graphics design, studied it and worked freelance for years where I created a ton of logos and corporate designs, webdesigns and so on. So I tend to create these things quite intuitively these days. Especially for personal projects. So I might not be great at explaining things. But please ask any specifics and I try to help out.
For the logo I picked colors that are important in the game. Mostly from the player and the lab. I painted the letters with a mouse by hand in pico-8, nothing fancy. I tried to go for a old-school game/metal logo feel, that's just what I like and seemed to fit. I kept the top side straight to give it a more ordered technical feel. The pointy bottom side was mostly for interest and to keep it less boring, but then I realized that I could give it some squigglies to imply fungal hyphae or rhizomorphs. That lead to also adding some of the mushrooms.
For the label itself I checked how other labels looked in splore and realized that the entire bottom half is covered by the splore UI. So I knew to put the logo in the top half to make it readable.
I layered multiple screenshots from different areas of the game so the progression through those areas is hinted at in the vertical arrangement.
I rearranged a few mushrooms and wall tiles where I thought they could look better.
I added the player sprite, because I wanted it in, but not clash with the logo. It is kinda awkward where it is now, but oh well :D
Because it all looked a bit flat I wanted to add a vignette for drama. Thing is, the label is also limited to the pico-8 color palette afaik. As far as I remember to get around this I made a white layer, added black gradient for the vignette, added a noise effect and crushed the levels, so I was left with pure black and white and then set the layer to multiply, so I got this kind of dithered vignette effect. Please excuse the Photoshop terms :D But to sum it up, I added a vignette effect consisting of random black pixels instead of a gradient.
Logo took around 1 hour after throwing out the first version that took around 30min.
Label probably 1 hour with taking screenshots.
I gotta say I'm not entirely happy with it. It could be stronger in its appeal. But I guess it's fine for the time I put in :)
If there is anything else you or anyone would like to know, just shoot!
@mkoloch , the label composition was very interesting to read about.
I honestly thought the chosen color palette was a self imposed constraint because using the 16 default pico-8 colors makes the screen instantly feel "pico-8y", the same way you can instantly recognize a ZX spectrum, a C64 or an Amstrad screen, just by the colors and resolution.
Pico8 palette has 32 colors, and the default display mode allows to have 16 of the 32 onscreen without constraints.
pal(index,color,1) to tell what color to use when index is found in the video memory.
index is in the 0..15 range
color in 0..15 for the standard colors and 128..143 / -16..-1 for the alternate colors
There are other video modes you can enable with magic pokes that allows to display more colors per frame (even 32 at once) with various constraints.
The label is 128 x 128 pixels, but can use the 32 colors without any constraints.
You could have used a 3 level noise mask, and use the fact that the alternate colors are roughly darkened versions of the standard palette to have two levels of darkening instead of just black, for example.
@RealShadowCaster thanks for the pointers! I looked into color palettes a bit more after making the game, but I generally like the pico-8 constraints and like to be creative in a limited space. So I guess you're right that the limit is somewhat self imposed.
I also have the feeling if I start pushing the limits I will end up in tech demo land. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I want to hone my general gamedev and especially game design skills.
Solid progression and an eerie atmosphere. The ending felt like a slight grind, but I expected that in a game like this.
For the ending,
Thanks for making it!
I’ve just created an account to thank you and congratulate you on making a great game.
I did not expect that but you’ve got me hooked in it for a couple of days.
Great style and really intelligent game design!
The VHS scanline effect does pull a lot of weight! I too would love to see a sequel, maybe with a few features you considered but couldn't add for this one. I'd love to see some motion in the background, or a few more colors or npcs etc.
I still haven't finished, but as soon as I can figure out a way to upgrade to holding two types of samples I'll be there quick!
@WoopyBoiii had to look up what "peam" means. Thanks :D
@SaltySalticid At this point, I can't see me not making a sequel.
The hard part will be to keep the scope in check. If I try to squeeze in everything I wanted for the first one + new stuff that a sequel needs, I'll never finish. In a lot of media sequels tend to be just bloated versions of the original. I would love to keep a follow up within a small scope like the first one. Add a bit more liveliness, sure, but don't go overboard with new features. Let's see how that's gonna go :D
Nice mining game, too bad the ending isn't what expected but at least the journey was worth it. Need a little thinking outside the box to solve limited slot issue.
Wow. Finally finished the game, and what an unbelievable ending. I saw this game on the Forum as I was ordering an RGB 30 and this was one of the first games I wanted to play on it aside from combo pool.
For those of you who may be getting stuck at a certain level of material collection, here's where I got stuck and how I got past it.
You may reach a point in the game that feels like a catch-22 where you need an upgrade but can't get the material you need. If you get stuck like this you should...
Tried this for the first time and ended up beating it in a single sitting. I really enjoyed to loop of going out to collect and stretching your air to the limit. I really enjoyed the time that I spent with it. I am also a fellow RGB30 owner and played through it there.
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I really like this game, but I'm stuck. There are these white squares, which I assume are quartz, that I'm unable to mine, despite all my items being leveled up to the point where I can't anymore,due to needing this mystery ore.
Nice game. it's the best I've played in a while! Can't wait for more updates for this game (hopefully)
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