A space shoot-em-up RPG where you play a daring pilot trying to earn your fortune, or die trying. Take on missions, trade goods or just shoot up some space pirates while flying between planets. Features:
- Open world with 8 planets to explore
- Space combat between 4 opposing factions
- 5 mission types, such as bounty hunting or protecting cargo ships
Controls:
Left/right = turn, up/down = accelerate/decelerate, z = fire
Objective:
Earn 10000 credits to win. -5000 credits and you lose the game.
About me:
This is my very first game! Ever! Thanks to Pico-8 for such a great platform to learn on, and also LazyDevs and SpaceCat for some great tutorials.
Please excuse the very inelegant code. I had some big plans but kinda burnt through all my tokens, so not sure whether future enhancements will be possible (mainly ship and weapon upgrades).
Thank you for playing and hope you enjoy! Please let me know what you think!
Very cool first game! One real quick small thing - your title screen says to use X to select, but it seems to actually be the circle button (Z on my keyboard) that is used to select.
Anyway, I did pretty poorly, but I'm gonna give it another go once my controller has charged, I think that'll be better for me than keyboard controls :).
A really fun, but hard game. I am not sure how distance works on pico-8 but the limitations are uniquely difficult
Thank you for giving it a go, and glad you found it fun! I tried to make it a bit more of a “serious” game.
I’m intrigued by what you mean by “distance”? If you mean the distance at which enemies can detect you for espionage missions - it’s about 50 pixels so about half the screen. So try to avoid them using the radar map, or also if you see the distance indicators pop up then try to head away from them. The distance indicators show ships that are about 200 pixels away which is just less than 2 screen lengths. Also the whole map is 2000 pixels tall and wide so again, about 20 screen lengths give or take.
A nice asteroids x elite combo. It's nice that the target ship/destination is maked with a differently coloured arrow, but sometimes it's hard to tell it apart from everything else, so arrows of different not just in colour, but in shape, pattern or size would be cool to have. Especially for slightly/partially/fully colourblind folks.
The mini map is full of bright pixels and it's great. Identifying them is a different matter. I think you've got both ships and planets marked there (not sure), but It's quite difficult to tell who is who when everything is a single pixel, so I'm not sure if this map is of any actual use. Most of the time I can't tell where I am, unless I'm on the border of the playable area.
It would be cool to have a proper dedicated map screen in the menu like in the original elite, but since you ran out of token that's probably not possible to implement.
I do appreaciate the effort and the game. I haven't seen other attepts of creating a space combat and trading Elite-like sim with all Pico-8 limitations, so you definitely get a star from me :)
All this is just my personal opinion, so feel free to ignore it.
Thank you lastofavari for the great feedback and for giving my game a go! My inspiration was the game Wing Commander Privateer but I'm sure it has its roots in Elite as well.
I do agree that the mini map is very small and usability is borderline but unfortunately I'm working with the limited pixels sizes and colours available through pico8. I did experiment in large shapes and different sizes (crosses and such) but anything larger than a single pixel covers everything and turns it into a complete mess. I do like your suggestion of a separate map screen though and might take that on board.
Cheers!
Very cool game! I thought I found all the rpg space games on pico 8! Found this in a splore lucky draw. Excited to give it a go!
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