Your spaceship is travelling back to Earth.
After 15 years of hyper sleep, you awaken to find your ship badly damaged and off-course.
You are orbiting an unknown planet with no communications network, and no way of knowing where you are or how to get home.
Your priority is to restore and upgrade essential systems to contact Earth for rescue.
DEEP SPACE is an incremental game where you take control of a damaged ship lost in space. Restore the ships systems, deploy a fleet of satellites and rovers around the planet you orbit, and contact Earth for rescue.
About
The game was originally created for the 2017 js13kGames coding competition, which challenges you to build a JavaScript game with a maximum file size of 13kb. You can play the original version here (the game is five years old, expect some rough edges):
https://js13kgames.com/games/deep-space/index.html
After discovering PICO-8, I wanted to explore how DEEP SPACE might look and work within the much stricter constraints of the console - especially the screen size and 16-bit integer limits.
Controls
The game is played entirely with the controls - no mouse. The controls are also displayed on-screen while playing.
z - open menu, buy upgrades.
x - go back.
up / down / left / right - navigate menus.
Changelog
- 2023/10/14 - 1.0.1 - fix an issue with the "satellite build" special upgrade.
Other
If you spot any issues or have any improvements/suggestions, please let me know :)
fun! the planet animation is very cute
the issue with the satellite upgrade is game.items[3].prices.upgrade = stringdiv(game.items[3].prices.upgrade,3) -- both prices should be price instead. but even with this fix you shouldn't select that upgrade, because the game crashes when you run that code, because stringdiv is very very slow.
you might consider dropping the string number system -- you can actually use all 32 bits of pico8 numbers to get about 2 billion as a maximum value; see "Large Numbers" from https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44512 or the manual: https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#TOSTR
@Verb @TotallyNotSeth @pancelor - thank you for the feedback. I'm sure I fixed this issue before publishing, so I think I might have re-uploaded the original version.
I've uploaded a new cart containing the fix. Please let me know if you run into any other problems.
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