st33d [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Gun Drops

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:33:38 UTC

Get as many blue detonators as you can.
Get the + for more weapon

Controls

Single Stick:

Arrow keys / d-pad to move
Z / 🅾️ to shoot
X / ❎ to toggle direction lock

Dual Stick Sort Of:

Arrow keys / d-pad to move
S, E, D, F to shoot
(we're cheating by using the 2-player controls because I honestly thought I would be satisfied with single stick, but here we are)

P: Pause Menu
From the pause menu you can swap move/shoot keys and turn on "autopause" for a more turn-based experience.

Made for 7 Day Roguelike Challenge 2023.

Copy Screen / Screengrab / Screenshot and Draw It Like a Sprite

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 19:43:06 UTC

I wanted to take a screenshot and draw it back to the screen like a sprite.

This is useful for screen transitions, like in Bubble Bobble where you scroll up to the next level.

The nice folks on the Pico-8 discord helped me put together this, which copies the screen to 0x8000 (the extended map location in 2.4+). Then when we want to draw it we copy it over the whole sprite sheet, draw that like a sprite, then reload the original sprite sheet.

screengrab_sprite

by st33d

[Click to Play]

function _init()
    cls()
    -- make something to screengrab
    for x=0,127,8 do
        for y=0,127,8 do
            rect(x, y, x+7, y+7, flr(rnd(16)))
        end
    end
    target_x, target_y = 0,0
    screengrab()
end

function _update()
    -- test we can draw the screengrab to a different place
    target_x = (target_x + 1) % 128
end

function _draw()
    cls()
    -- copy to sprite sheet location
    memcpy(0x0000, 0x8000, 8192)
    -- draw it to screen
    sspr(0, 0, 128, 128, target_x, target_y)
    -- restore the sprite sheet
    reload(0x0000,0x0000,8192)
    -- debug where the screen should be painted to
    rect(target_x, target_y, target_x + 2, target_y + 2, 7)
    -- check we reloaded the sprite sheet
    spr(0, target_x, target_y + 8)
end

-- copy the screen to extended map location
function screengrab()
    memcpy(0x8000,0x6000,8192)
end

Other methods could be used like using memcpy to paint direct from memory - which would be a lot faster. This thread may offer some help with that.

If anyone would like to improve on this example please do. There's not a lot of posts on the subject that offer any working examples so the more the merrier.

Vom Vom Castle - 1 or 2 player platformer-puke-em-up

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 13:45:12 UTC

vomvomcastle

by st33d

[Click to Play]

The castle is yours - but first you must puke all over it!

Controls

Player 1
Left / Right: arrow keys
Jump: Z, N, C
Puke: X, V, M

Player 2
Left / Right: S, F
Jump: Left Shift, Tab
Puke: A, Q

Player 2 can join at any time by pressing the 2nd player jump or puke button.
2 players are not necessary to complete the game.

A dev-log for the game is here: https://twitter.com/st33d/status/1436396564046614529

Stomp! [turn-based-platformer-roguelike]

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 12:56:15 UTC

stomp

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Controls

walk: left,right
stomp: down / X
jump: up / O

Stomp!

A turn-based-platformer-roguelike. The objective is to get a high score in 300 turns (10,000 is good).

Use your stomp to set rocks rolling, spikes falling, and bombs exploding.

Score Card

Wall: 10
Rock: 20
Wall, Drill: 50
Wall, Bomb: 80
Gem: 500
Worm: ???
Gold Worm: ???

You get half-points for anything you destroy with your amazing stomp - find other ways to destroy stuff.

Please post your best score if you choose to comment.

Cardinal Ramship Pirate

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 19:56:25 UTC

cardinal_pirate

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Controls

Arrow keys to move. Z to wait. X to toggle menu.

Cardinal Ramship Pirate

You have descended into Bordered Space in pursuit of the famed Big Golden Chest. The area has many guardians but you have a time crystal and a pirate ramship...

Ram into other ships to damage them. Only the fastest moving ship deals damage.

Use the menu to change equipment - each provides different advantages and disadvantages. Scrap items to regain lost health and fuel - some will even increase your maximum health and fuel capacity.

Made for the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, 2021.

Check out my other carts if you want just the code for the menu or physics.

Cardinal Menu

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 20:02:57 UTC

cardinal_menu

by st33d

[Click to Play]

I wanted a nice simple menu system for pico-8 so I decided to recreate an old UI I made ages ago in Flash (my game Red Rogue uses it).

The Cardinal Menu only uses arrow keys to navigate. The menu is made of branches. Each item in a branch points to either a string (providing a description panel), a function in your code, a new branch, or nothing (disabled).

The purpose of this system is to make it as fast as possible to build a menu and add options.

In the demo you can see what each option does and there's a demonstration of an inventory system.

The menu system alone is 712 tokens.

This is about as basic I could make it without adding too much noise to the code, but I welcome suggestions for improvements and optimisations.

cardinal_menu

by st33d

[Click to Play]

A quick update...

Let's say you're in a shop and you have 5 gold. A sword is 5 gold and an axe is 10 gold. You want the menu to say the axe option is disabled. So now you can define a menu item that checks if it's disabled - you just point it at a function that gives an answer.

I also added a selection animation for input feedback and trimmed down my math. The menu alone is now 800 tokens but at least it's a round number and easy to build a crafting system with.

Flip Knight

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 12:28:10 UTC

flipknight

by st33d

[Click to Play]

I maintained a tweet-log whilst developing this, if you're curious:

https://twitter.com/st33d/status/1335279243371143170

Cardinal Gun Prospector

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 19:11:55 UTC

cgprospector

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Controls

Arrow keys to move. Z or X to fire.

Walk into a gun to equip it. Collect gold / fuel / light / more guns.

The desktop build works with a gamepad plugged in (tested on Windows 10).

Cardinal Gun Prospector

You have beamed down your remote droid to loot the famed Monster Caverns. You only have enough juice to beam down a simple pop-gun next to you but plenty of weapons are left around from previous visitors. Get in there and loot as much gold as you can!

Made for the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, 2020.

Failed 7DRL [Numberwang]

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 08:41:23 UTC

numberwang

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Been putting this together rather rapidly. Not only am I fast running out of tokens with no room for polish, I'm finding the gameplay a bit dull.

The idea is that you can only attack on higher ground. Same for the monsters. This is sort of interesting because it leads to a fair bit of dancing around to find a spot where you can attack. But I'm honestly just back-tracking whenever I meet a monster. Changing the numbers as a result of attacks keeps me and the monsters moving, but not in a way I find interesting.

I tried bigger maps with scrolling, but a grid of numbers trundling along is a great source of motion sickness. This idea seems better suited for a much smaller map. I'd probably make more use of the spells by virtue of accidentally looking at them.

Hopefully there's still time left in 7DRL to hack this apart and make something else. But I've gotten this far so I thought it fair to show what I've done.

Recursive Shadowcasting

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 16:03:45 UTC

recursive_shadowcasting

by st33d

[Click to Play]

What's a roguelike without some lighting? #7DRL is fast approaching so I thought I'd re-familiarise myself with pico8. I've ported shadowcasting before but someone on this forum has already done that for me. Unfortunately it's not in cart format where I can see it in action. So let's fix that.

I did some small changes:

"cast" gets used for a lot of things so I called it fov instead
Recursive shadowcasting calculates within a square, which looks ugly. I've added a distance check to slice off those hard corners.

Here's the url of the original post: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=28780

Obviously I'm not looking at pico8's map, just one I've generated. But one could modify it to taste. I'm also being quite wasteful because I only need to iterate through the keys in "visible", but I wanted to be certain there were no bugs and this proves the point.

pakpok

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 18:57:20 UTC

pakpok

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Left,Right to move.
Z,X to jump. Hold jump to glide.

Wanted to make something with the game-feel-onomatopoeia of "pak-pok". There's a lot of this in games (eg: Mario turtle shells) but the "pok" usually ends in death.

My last cart-game featured a lot of death so I felt like making something nice instead. But then I kinda needed spikes. Sorry. It's a little bit violent, but no one dies.

This game is built on top of the simple platformer engine I posted here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=35086

Thanks to the following for helping test the game: Mark Foster, Hafiz Azman, Dugan, Paul Jeffries, Martin Ferenc, German Gonzalez

Platformer engine with crates and moving platforms

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 20:27:56 UTC

cratesncrushers

by st33d

[Click to Play]

Version 0.2

Pros

Ledges (top only).
Moving platforms.
Crates that can push crates on moving platforms whilst you stand on top.
Reads the map as level geometry.
The above features can be removed to retrieve tokens.
Can probably be optimised.

Cons

No slopes.
2618 tokens (the raw engine is 1711 but you still need to make a player, enemies, update, etc).
First come, first served resolution: You only get 1 collision contact (you have to be creative to get more).

Updates

Updated this page and rewrote the engine to use less tokens and be more extendable. Only saved 252 tokens sadly but every little helps.

Metrash

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 12:15:31 UTC

metrash

by st33d

[Click to Play]

METRASH

A top-down-shooter metroid-like.

Cursors keys to move, Z / X to fire.

1 hour or less playtime, does not save.

This is my first Pico-8 project. Apart from the class definition (which I abstracted) I wrote the whole thing from scratch in 2 weeks of spare time. This meant it turned into more of a shmup odyssey than a metroidvania. I will have to listen to a lot of feedback before I know what weapons, monsters, and topography would have worked better.

Let me know what you'd expect from a sequel.