Birds and Saws
Experience a nostalgic throwback with this Pico-8 demake of my classic iOS game. Dive into the retro charm and challenge yourself as you guide a bird, skillfully avoiding menacing circular saws to rack up high scores.
Check out the project on GitHub.
Gameplay
Blades ascending from below prompt the player to move upward swiftly, requiring nimble maneuvers to avoid a perilous demise.
- You can initiate a new jump without having to wait for the current one to land.
- The lower blades progressively increase in speed over time.
- The saws' velocity is limited, reaching a challenging top speed that demands swift maneuvers to escape.
Controls
- ⬅️ or [Z] to jump left
- ➡️ or [x] to jump right
Version History
I liked the game, but it would be cool if the blades rose more slowly and if along the way there were checkpoints to grab that made the blades stop for a second or two. This way we can play for longer and have a greater sense of accomplishment playing the game.
edit: Now I understand... The faster we play, the slower the blades rise. Either way, my ideas might be interesting for another playing mode for the game.
This concept is really cool and its really fun, but I agree that its a tad hard.
My best is 40. On the good runs I end up in this... flow state? Its very weird but very cool.
I think just slightly lowering the rate at which the raising spike floor's speed increases could help a lot.
Edit: I'm not sure how but I tried literally one time after I made this message and got 114... I have no idea how I did it, it felt amazing.
Is the spike floor speed capped at some point? (maybe based on the speed the player is going up to some degree?) It seemed to be right on my tail the whole time after a certain point.
Amazing game, the presentation is top notch. The game is tough but I think its what makes it fun.
Hello everyone,
I've observed that some of you were not entirely satisfied with the initial speed of the blades. Upon further inspection, I realized it was indeed on the higher side at the beginning of the game. I've made some slight adjustments without compromising the game's difficulty. The post has been updated with this tweaked version.
Additionally, I have enhanced the description to provide a bit more information about the mechanics, highlighting that you can jump off mid-flight without waiting for the current jump to land.
Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. It is greatly appreciated.
is there any way to speed up the camera so that it snaps to the player faster?
Hey @Aspext1090, feel free to experiment with the camera settings.
Locate the following vars and set them to:
o.tracking=1 o.track_faster=0 |
This should result in accurate tracking, although there might be a slight jerkiness in the movement.
Great stuff!
I love this game - SO addictive :-)
The use of colour, sound, everything.... spot on.
Thanks very much!
I've just realised that after playing this for a while, the vertical motion makes the whole screen appear to move downwards when you finally die, particularly if you've been going a while e.g. score > 100!
Pretty cool secondary effect :-)
Very nice game, also readable code, gonna look for it
So good! We have been having our own little high score challenge with this in our discord and I just surpassed the others with this run:
@NerdyTeachers, this is really cool! I wish there was a way to incorporate leaderboard functionality into Pico-8.
My best is 617.
LOVE THIS 10/10 so hard but unbeatably fun when you find a groove- i find singing in my head helps to het into the "flow" of the game. Gold star for you.
@yokozuna
Leaderboard :
sounds like an easy functionality to add to pico-8, right ? While I feel for you, this is actually a good idea not to include the functionality natively in pico-8:
Truth is it's a trust based system, and you can't reasonably trust the entire internet to play nice.
When all the submitted data is your chosen pseudo and your score, It is trivially easy to wreck the leaderboard, even if you add checksums or encryption. Nothing stops players from changing the score=0 line of your code to score=100000 to take the lead. Nothing stops them to create a loop that will turn the leaderboard into an unmoderated public doodle...
On game websites like Kongregate, the leaderboards handling is a permanently a lost battle. Even when the login part is natively linked to the website account, the high scores are vandalized daily and the only nice feature remaining is the "friends only" filtered view of the table. You don't want to become the moderator of your own high score leader-board...
But if after all these warnings, you still feel like it, here's a relatively easy solution :
On the game over screen, if a new high score is reached, ask the player for his chosen name (that you can locally save with cartdata), then display a 2D bar code containing a url to the leaderboard web page, including the name and score to add to the table. What I love with this solution is that you can submit your high score with your phone even if the pico-8 device is offline.
Note that the situation is not always as bad as described : it is sometimes possible to submit a proof alongside the high score.
I've seen this on sokoban leaderboards : the actual sequence of moves played is sent with the high score, and the server side of the leader board can replay it and check is the resulting grid is solved or not.
Thanks for a great game, Yoko! One small issue that I've noticed - if you leave the game on Game Over screen for a few minutes it starts flashing red like crazy. Here's a clip - https://imgur.com/a/TS0W0Zy
@lastofavari I will take look and try to fix it. Thank you for playing.
@lastofavari The flashing red issue on the game over screen has been fixed in version 0.1.2b. Thank you once again for bringing it to my attention.
Really cool! I'm new to this community but gotta say this gives a good first impression :)
This is my 7 year olds new favorite game. He's already up to 142!
Hey @Helacaster, that's fantastic to hear! It sounds like your 7-year-old is really enjoying the game and making impressive progress with score of 142. It's great to see such enthusiasm and engagement.
@yokozuna : there's a new scoresub function that allows post high scores on the BBS. You expressed interest in having a global online shared high score table, your wish has been granted, it seems.
If you implement it and start having to deal with high score moderation, please share your experience as the high score table seem to just have an id string like carddata, so there is no owner or administrator as far as I can tell.
@RealShadowCaster Thank you for letting me know. Is this somewhere documented?
@yokozuna, I stumbled on it while using the built in help of pico-8 : I typed help, then help data and saw the unknown to me scoresub entry, then typed help scoresub. It may well be a sneak peek at a future functionality : I haven't tested it myself but remembered you were interested in it.
EDIT : just tested it, the function just displays a red popup at the bottom of the screen that says "HI SCORES NOT IMPLEMENTED YET", sorry for the misinformation.
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