Hungry Potato

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Hungry Potato

by voidgazerBon

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)

@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 :)

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.

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