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Cart #hungrypotato-3 | 2023-07-27 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License
13

Hungry potato

Description:

In "Hungry Potato", you play as a lovable potato with an insatiable appetite. Your mission is to help the famished spud capture falling food while evading many pesky enemies.

Controls:

  • Left Arrow: Move Left
  • Right Arrow: Move Right
  • X Key: Jump
  • Z Key: Turn on/off music

Features:

  • Several Enemies: You encounter a variety of critters which are progressively more challenging to dodge.
  • Hunger Berserk: If the hunger grows over a threshold, the potato goes into a hungry frenzy, allowing it to devour all enemies and invulnerability at the cost of a quickly decreasing score.
  • Boss fight: At the end of level 25, a boss - Mr Squirrel- stops the potato on its journey.

Background:

This is my first larger project in Pico-8. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

-- update 2023-07-26

  • fix issues where player would die in menu, before the game would start
  • thanks @phil for feedback
    • Turn on/off music with Z-key
    • improve visibility of text for level and points

-- update 2023-07-27

  • added difficulty options (default, easy)
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@voidgazerBon - Congratulations! You have created a small charming game. The graphics are very appealing.

Some comments, that you can choose to ignore if you wish:

  • What makes the level value increase? Is it just time? I think it starts on level 2 and then goes to level 3 before I even eat anything?
  • I like the game mechanic of not eating for a bit so I can go into a frenzy to eat the enemies. This is a good bit of gameplay, but can I actually starve to death?
  • The level value at bottom right is in red against brown making it difficult to read. Just change the colour
  • Does the score have to have a trailing "P" ? It took me a while to work out what it represented
  • Please have an option to turn of the music and just have the sound effects!
  • The gameplay can get a bit dull after a while (I only made it to level 17 so never saw the boss). How about every 5 levels, there is a pause? Or maybe day turns to night and vice-versa. I see that as levels increase new enemies are introduced (the big mushrooms were particulalry annoying, but in a good way)
  • I think this game either needs lives or health points. Its very punnishing at the minute

But bravo for creating this ! I have never created a finished PICO 8 cartridge so you're doing better than I am :)



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Hi @phil, thank you for the great feedback. I have updated the game with some of your points (see the update log). To address some of your comments,

  • The levels are mostly just for the timekeeping. So players can track how far they got and compare their scores with their previous runs.
  • You cannot starve to death, but you can run out of points. So nothing prevents players from staying in a frenzy and having a relatively easy run, except that their final score will be very low.
  • I like the idea of changing the day to night to break out the monotony. I will think about implementing it.


I got to level 26 and the squirrel appeared - but then I died almost instantly! I think this may be too tough for me...



@phil I think you are right about the difficulty, so I added "easy" version, where you have 3 hearts and "default" with only 1 heart.

There is a trick to the final boss. You have to stay in the frenzy for the entire fight, which allows you to gnaw on the boss.



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Well done! Tough, but fun and you put a lot into it, taking a simple game and fully fleshing it out.



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