Hi, I created PICOPIC, a minimum picross game. It has only 9 levels for now but with 25x25 size which I believe the maximum we can create on Pico-8.
Clever cramming of information on screen, with up to 7 clues and 25 tiles, there's not a single pixel left unused...
Alas, too much readability has been sacrificed, the 3x3 font is too hard to read, witch is a big problem for a game where reading the clues is the main activity.
In the screenshot, the vertical 11 3 5, is very hard to read : there's no pixel contact between the 11 and it's underline, the 3 looks like a zero because of the underline of the 14, and the 5 need half a second to decode : to me it's a Z pentomino and I have to reread it every time to know if it's a 2 or a 5.
So to improve readability :
You can get rid of the underlines, keep the white for single digits but use colors to group double digits. You have a lot of unused colors, so you can avoid horizontal pairings of vertical clues and horizontal pairing of vertical clues. You could use 2 color for even rows and columns, and 2 other colors for odd rows and columns, for example.
You should display the clues concerning the current row and column of the cursor in 3x5 font : for the horizontal clues, there"s no problem, the zoomed/highlighted would be drawn over a bit of the clues of the rows over and under the active one, but that info is just one move away in good font, so no big deal.
It's trickier for the vertical clues as each number will need 6 pixels, and there's 28 pixels left, the zooming is only possible with up to four clues, but 2 digit clues count as one as they can be displayed horizontally. When there's not enough room, the zoomed version of the clues could be displayed in the top left corner instead.
other problem, Level 2 displays ERROR on the top left corner.
[Please log in to post a comment]
