Save Picoville
To learn Pico 8 I recreated (in broad strokes) one of my favorite Commodore 64 games, Save New York. My first playable version took about 10 days of work, then a few weeks of tightening things up.
I'm loving Pico 8 so far. I've been trying to get some momentum on making a game for years, and Pico 8 is making it fun. It reminds me of programming as a kid on C=64 and Amiga. Constraints ftw.
I find it hilarious that the original game has much better crumbling building animations. I tried several attempts at matching it, but ended up returning to my initial method, using a simple sprite cycle + a few random particles. I eventually caved in and added screen shake which helps a bit.
Extra life every 1000 points.
Controls: move around, shoot! (either button works)
Changelog
v1.12
- increase difficulty ramp (matches original game, need to kill 10+16*(level-1) enemies per level, so 10, 26, 42, 58, etc)
v1.10
- added one-off gfx for custom title and about page bg
- added smoke behind plane (the code for this is hilariously bad)
- about page with points table
- new (temporary?) theme music
v1.04
- randomized supply plane position to avoid cheat spots
- persistent hi-score
v1.03
- improve player hitbox to be more lenient
- many bug fixes
v1.02
- extra life every 1000 pts
- stagger enemy animations, tweak frequency
- new sfx
v1.01
- fix train hitbox
- 2D-man now understands left + right
- much improved bullet collisions
v1.00
- initial playable version
I put enough finishing touches on this li'l game to switch to "releases" including custom title gfx, an about page, a more concerted effort at a theme song, and a satisfying smoke trail behind the plane.
Still seeing a few tiny bugs I'd like to fix. For one, I don't like that you can't shoot an enemy as he's chomping on a building. The bullet hits the building first, instead of giving preference to the enemy sprite.
I guess the way I'm handling buildings (as dynamic map tiles) is maybe weird, but it seemed like the most efficient way with my limited knowledge. It does make the collision detection a bit more challenging.
Any feedback on how to make it more fun and/or challenging is welcome. I hesitate to stray too far from the original, but I've already made several changes, so maybe more custom additions could be implemented as an easy/hard tier or similar.
After watching some longplays of the original C=64 game, I realized I misread the old manual. "You have to kill 10 mutants to save New York in the first round. Add 16 more mutants for each higher level." Looking back, that seems pretty clear, but I had it at 10 enemies for first level, and just 16 to pass each level past that, which was way too easy.
New version makes you kill 26 on level 2, 42 on level 3, 58 on level 4, etc, which makes a lot more sense. Now the fuel supply balloons are actually useful, and it's a wee bit tougher to avoid the inevitable destruction of Picoville by twitching spacecrabs.
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