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 :)
Lovely work. I thought I didn't care for the genre but this is so well done that I can't stop playing
Same as ilkke - I never really liked Marble Madness on NES, but I actually have found both Marballs games to be a TON of fun! The custom cart for user-created levels is an awesome idea as well.
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!
Wonderful!
Would you consider adding an option where the controls can be rotated 45 degrees? That is, up becomes diagonally up and right, down becomes diagonally down and left?
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 got all of the ace times! Climb was the hardest for me just because I kept bumping into the walls and missing the shortcut almost every time. This is one of my favorite games for the PICO-8.
Wow this is awesome! My favourite game for pico-8 so far. I Especially loved the music.
I love this. So smooth and polished, and really fun to try to better times, even though I don't think I'll ever beat the aces times. And I am so happy it has to option to swap the controls 45°!
v1.11 just fixes some wonky code that got broken by 0.1.11 :)
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.
Now we need Marballs vs where you play with friends and try to push them out of the stage
Really cool! How'd you make the pixelate effect? ... (as if PICO isn't pixelated already--) how'd you make it pixelate... more?
Love the music! the track at pattern 19 is my favorite! ^_^
@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!
I've just noticed a bug in the Restart message that shows the same input for Yes and No.
It was in the custom cartridge, I don't know if this has been fixed in the normal game cartridge.
@huulong Ah thanks for the feedback! I've updated the custom cart to work out of the box, and it can now be loaded from PICO-8 using load #marballs_2_custom
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
If the custom carts have to do with code and such, I cannot do anything lol
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!
New version with 3 new levels from THATUSERUSER's level pack :D
We got a more convenient cart ID now too!
Also updated the custom cart so that the level selector scrolls when there are more than 13 levels.
Thanks, @lucatron! The plateaus level is a lot more polished now, the changes you implemented are very effective!
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. :)
@THATUSERUSER Heh, I beat gold time without doing that glitch.
@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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