Controls
- ⬆️ Walk
- ⬅️➡️ Turn left/right
- ⬇️ Toggle basic HUD
- ❎ [X] Hold for full HUD and ⬅️⬆️➡️⬇️ to inspect the surroundings
- ⓩ [Z] Open Inventory/Actions menu
How to play
You initially can't do much -except gathering fruits- more items and actions will be unlocked as you progress in the game.
So just explore the islands and:
- talk to the stone statue/head
- walk under palm-trees to gather a couple fruits if any
Here be Dragons
The writing "Here be Dragons" at the edge of the map means you can't walk farther at that moment:
the game map is initially just a small portion of the full map, next areas will be unlocked by defeating the enemy creatures, just report your success to the statue (Kahuna).
Leader of the Pack
As soon as picking up starfish is unlocked ensure you're the leader (check the colour of the ⭐ leader on top-left, if white it's you). If one of the other members of the pack becomes the leader you will often lose the control and your instincts will guide you to join your leader. You can still use left/right to avoid troubles or pick up stuff.
Papa, the Cloud, Beasts, Hints & Unexplained Secrets
Credits
Code,sfx,music,gfx by @Heracleum
Thanks to:
- @SmartAlloc for proofreading and correcting the dialogues script!
- @freds72 @shy and others in Discord for the precious help with tricks and optimisation secrets.
- @thisismypassword for creating shrinko8 and its prodigious minifying powers!
- c_hrissy on SoundCloud for inspiration on the theme, brilliant chord progression!
- The actual Hawaiian Legend of Kuna the dragon, in short: https://www.hilohattie.com/blogs/news/the-legend-of-kuna-the-dragon
- Bugs reported: @Wolfe3D @ericb @freds72
Version history:
- 3 Fixed bugs: two nasty bugs with dialogue selection/confirm (ericb, freds72)
- 2 Fixed bug: mashing both buttons crash (Wolfe3D)
One Cart
This is my first Pico-8 full game. As a personal challenge I tried to squeeze everything in one cart including the start screen gfx and game data. So I basically have no tokens nor compressed character space left to add a line. Yes, this strongly limited the dialogues and room for taking full advantage of the isometric engine, pseudo-voxels and adding more features/stuff.
I hope you enjoy it anyway.
Thanks for playing!
This is really cool! I did manage to crash it by button mashing X and O together a few times, just a heads up.
pretty cool game but my main problem was with how slow the character moves and how blurry the pixel art is, sometimes the graphics create biblical accurate felines
> how slow the character moves
Carry weight slows you down (e.g. carrying too many stone) but there are quests for +speed and temple bonus that also make items less heavy.
You could also drop & pile-up stone (and fruits) to keep a stash for later, the pack will not steal from stacks higher than 5.
Congratulations on your finish. Lots of interesting tech in here, thanks for sharing.
This is really interesting and quite beautiful, but I suspect that the screen resolution of Pico-8 is just slightly too little for this game. Picotron might be the perfect fit for this by the looks of it when it's available :)
@binarycrusader or Voxatron maybe? Since everything except the cloud is sort of voxel-oriented here. BTW yes resolution, in fact -being the first project- I totally overscoped and asked pico8 more than it could give (hitting all limits: tokens, compressed chars and memory as well).
Yes, now that you mention it, Voxatron might be a good fit too, but this is still stunningly well done for a prototype.
This is wonderfully ambitious and I spent a couple hours trying to get into it, but it really needs some work.
The graphics look like colorful static. Nothing is identifiable. All the collectible items are a blodge of 4 or 5 colored pixels in a mush of other, similar-colored pixels. It takes a lot of practice to even see a fruit against sand/dirt, and you'll need to learn, because pickup is manual by default and even when it's turned on, half the time you can walk right over something and not pick it up.
If you eat the first three fruits, the way the guy tells you to, you'll have a hell of a time finding two more to use for the planting recipe. And then a long, miserable time trying to actually grow more fruit, because you rarely get more out than you put in and you'll lose that little profit to random dudes walking through and stealing your seeds and fruit out of the ground, with nothing you can do to stop them.
This last time, just before Pico-8 crashed again, we seemed to have run entirely out of rocks after making the 50-rock offering and fighting a couple more monsters. There's grey blobs scattered all over the ground, but none of them are actually rocks. When I attack a monster, the pack just swarms around without throwing anything.
The car-with-no-reverse-gear controls seem unnecessary to begin with, and that much worse when it's so hard to tell what direction your critter is facing. It would be a lot better with simple 8-way movement. Put the HUD toggle in the menu.
There's nothing insurmountable here. Just fixing the controls, making the background less busy, and maybe increasing the pickup radius a bit would go a long way. Simplifying the background might free up a couple tokens, I dunno.
Again, love the ambition.
@PhasmaFelis thank you for trying this first (epic fail 😅) project, everything you mentioned is so true.
Yes I sometimes think I could try giving this cart a big fix.
Btw I really appreciated!
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