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A sequel to Marballs, now with verticality, orbs and jump pads!
Controls:
Roll around with the arrow keys, jump with Z and use X to pause and restart.
Use the pause menu (ESC or enter) to return to the main menu.
To swap to 45° controls choose "swap controls" in the pause menu.
Custom Level Packs
Create and share your own levels using the custom cart below!


Top shelf, man, top shelf. Did you do the music too?
I haven't inspected any code yet but there are a ton of things I'd love to learn from this cart...or have snippeted out, even - like the intro "drawing" of the title. Is that some magic or just drawing lines from coordinate to coordinate?
And now I really need to find my old NES Max controller :)


Very nice game, dude! I thought Marballs was pretty good, but this is even better!


This is incredible! The music is awesome.. the gameplay is so frustratingly addictive.. Custom levels.. whaaaat? Like others have said, I hope to learn a lot by dissecting this.


wow great game! the music was really well done, and the controls+collision feels just right. Your attention to detail is amazing, like that intro is so good it gives me shivers, haha


This is just superb - so slick and playable! Congratulations!


Thanks for nice comments everyone :)
@johnesco Good idea! You can change this in the pause menu now.
@morningtoast Yep the musics all me! Here's the logo thing clipped out:



I want to test the level editor, but I cannot run the custom cartridge with pico8 0.1.11 nor 0.1.12c. Loading works (2683 chars) but on RUN:
Syntax error line 11 (tab 0) creator_name = ??? unexpected symbol near `?` |
Also, I had to download it and put it in my pico8/carts folder, as it was not present on the BBS like the actual game.


Really cool! How'd you make the pixelate effect? ... (as if PICO isn't pixelated already--) how'd you make it pixelate... more?


@Blessmyday I saved the png of the cartridge at the bottom with "custom" written on it (then got the issues mentioned in my previous post).
But I've just realized I may have to fill the "???" in the creator_name, that's all!
UPDATE: ok, so to actually make it work:
- Create a copy of the png cart in case you want to start anew
- Open the custom png cart with pico8 (drag and drop to PICO-8 if your OS support it, else run "pico8 marballs_2_custom.p8.png" (not "pico8 -run" the first time, it would fail on the "???" mentioned above)
- In the source code editor, read the comments. In particular, you need to set your author and custom cartridge name, as well as fill some level data (replace the "???").
- Edit the cartridge data following the instructions
- Save and run!


Man I had a ton of fun with this. My first playthrough was pretty fun, but speedrunning is where it's at.
Here's a list of my best times (good luck beating them):
- Simple - 4.03
- Climb - 6.86
- Orbs - 3.66
- Tetrominoes - 6.80
- Eight - 7.10
- Boost - 3.16
- Trampoline - 5.53
- Snake - 8.63
- Example (from the custom cart) - 2.00


I have had a lot of fun with this over the past week. It is really polished, and it has a lot of level potential. Speaking of that, I couldn't find anybody else who had made a custom cart yet, which I thought was a shame, so I made thirteen levels of my own! (Great work implementing the custom level cart, by the way, it was great idea!) You can play the cart here. And yes, @lucatron, if you wanted to implement any of my levels into the offical game I would be honored. Sorry if that sounded a bit like an advertisement, it was just an unintended side effect of what I was trying to say.
On another note, I do have one suggestion for a change you could implement. On the level select screen, there is no scrolling, so if you have any more than thirteen levels (which is why I didn't have any more) the text will start to run off the screen. If you could implement this, then there would probably be enough map space for at least 20 large levels per cart, and many more if you were doing smaller levels. In any case, this is a great game. Good work!


What are the strats to getting ace time on "The Pyramid"?


Ha, @StinkerB06, my brother had a lot of fun routing that one. There is this interesting mechanic in the game that he used extensively to move the ball faster in many of my levels, especially that one, though. Basically, if you hit a wall at a certain angle, you move away from the wall at a higher speed from normal. This may be considered a bug, but it actually made many of my levels, as well as the official levels, more fun to play. So try to hit as many walls as possible (well, the ones that will help you anyway). Another thing you should try is to do a sort of zig-zag route. Like, start the map by going (relative to the screen) north-west, then go east till you hit the edge of the map, then go north west for one tile, then go west until you hit the edge, and then, if you picked an efficient route, you should have a straight shot north-east to the finish. I didn't want to spoil it all for you though. :)


@StinkerB06 Nice! All of the ace times (at least my original pack; I haven't checked to see if @lucatron changed any of them) were simply the best times that me and my brother were able to get. There was one map in specific that he sat grinding for hours. It's the "Residue" map, and it is similar to the pyramid map in the sense that you have to collect a bunch of orbs before reaching the exit, and you can go in pretty much any direction. If anyone beats his time, I will honestly be pretty surprised.


@THATUSERUSER Here's my best time on the level:

I beat aced time on every other level :)


This game is beautifully constructed, down to the finest details! Great job.


Nice, @StinkerB06! If you liked my levels that were added to the official cart, you should check my custom cart. There are some pretty tricky ones in there! So far, the last one hasn't been completed by a single person, so far as I know, though I have tested all of the jumps to make sure that they were possible.


Love it! Thank you for making this, I can appreciate the controls and way that it feels.
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