This is my first PICO-8 game.
I am a high school teacher, and I'm involved in our "e-Learning" program. I thought PICO-8 would be an interesting way to introduce students to coding.
So this game is something of a "proof of concept" to show that with very limited experience (I'm not an IT teacher and have no formal IT training) you can quickly put together a working game. We're running a "Mission to Mars" inquiry learning project for our Year 9 classes next year, so that gave me the theme.
I wanted to include:
— a title screen
— movement
— animation
— a scoring system
— sound effects
— music
The code is extremely ugly, because I was just trying to make it work as quickly as possible. It's a mess, to be honest. There is a lot going on in _draw that should be in _update, for starters.
This was three evenings, learning everything from scratch. I'm pretty pleased with it, although it's not a game that will hold your attention for long! But it should be enough for me to show my school that PICO-8 is something we should encourage our students to play with.
(I owe a debt to Drop Down, which I used to work out how to create game states, and the basic falling/gravity mechanic.)
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