A simple little game that fits in a single tweet, coming in at 271 characters. For the itch.io #TweetTweetJam (which actually allowed two tweets' worth of characters but what the hell, eh?).
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Hi there,
Someone posted somewhere (here, the Slack channel, Twitter - who knows!) a single animated gif showing PICO-8 or PICO-8-like graphics demonstrating how to code jump and bounce physics. It covered speed and acceleration, the jump "arc", and as the ball moved showed the real values of variables.
I didn't dream this, did I?
Anyone have a copy or a link to it? I don't seem to be able to find the key search terms to get something useful from Google!
Does anyone know of a routine that lets you have a screen that's, say, 256x256, but scaled to fit the normal 128x128? I know it'll look pretty poor, but that won't matter for what I have in mind.
So I can pretend the screen is bigger than it is, then it's just magically squashed to fit.
(See WIP thread here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=29464)
Well, it's done. I can already see ways to improve it, but the idea was more "can I make an invaders clone?", and I think I've shown that yes, yes I can.
I've learned a lot here. How to fling a million sprites around at once. Sound effects. Using tables in tables in tables to create level layouts. I used shortcuts (asset reuse) of course, but ultimately I've made a playable, if pretty simple, game.
Oh, and there's a Super Secret (not really - look at the code) cheat mode that gives you an extra life and reduces the fire rate of the catvaders. You might need it because the game is a bit hard. Too hard for me, anyway!
Sound effects. All the terrible blips and bloops and crashes. No, the noise sort of crashes. Although potentially the other sort too.
I think I might need to fiddle with the difficulty though, as I can't get past level 5 now.
And catufos are in!
So there's still more to do, but I've now got an actually playable game! With different levels, different catvaders (some shoot faster and more frequently), and so on.
I've dealt with what happens when catvaders reach the bottom of the screen (they don't move any further down) but I think I might change it. Instant Game Over if they hit the player?
I've also made the catvaders speed up every time you hit one.
Still to do: UFO thing, sound, better Game Over screen, maybe some music.
Toying with different catvader types - easy to do just to make each line a different sprite, but considering changing how often they fire based on type, and maybe get them to fire diagonally? This also opens up making levels more difficult as I can include more, "harder" catvaders on higher levels.
Thoughts?
Added bullets! And bases! And collisions! And levels! How exciting!
Yes, I'm reusing assets from my "Cats. And Sometimes, Dogs" game. No, I haven't got any collisions in there yet. Had a bit of a struggle getting the "invaders" to march properly, they were doing odd things when they bounced. Like this:
Anyway, that's fixed now.
The world needs one more Invaders clone, right?
Created for the My First Game Jam: Winter 2017 on itch.io. The theme was "Cats and/or dogs".
Written in a few hours. Woo!
Working on a game with a scrolling overworld, with collisions. Not sure yet what it will become, so basics for now.
v0.20 (2016/12/13):
