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Hi! I present my first PICO-8 project. It's called CGA, and is an adaptation of John Langan's short story, Technicolor.

The limitation of 4 colors on screen at a time, but the freedom to change palettes immediately implanted the idea of using this story, for reasons that become apparent as the story goes on. It's really more of a visual novel in the most limiting sense, rather than a game per se. But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, as a way of getting my feet wet with PICO-8 development.

I have to add an extra special thanks to @dddaaannn for his text compression tool – un-abridged, I think the story would have been too long to fit on the cart without any code. I was able to use his tool to eke out the last bit of space necessary to make a cart. @Oli414's dialogue text box and @johanp's lowercase font was essential in making the long text easier to read.

P#68694 2019-10-11 22:26 ( Edited 2019-10-14 11:13)

Don’t know the story but looks like a cool implementation! Glad my font could be put to good use!

P#68787 2019-10-12 11:44

The story definitely reminded me of something I read when I was younger. The mood is excellent, well done!

Sometimes the dialogs contain series of xxxxxxxxxx, is that a bug?

P#68790 2019-10-12 12:38

I love it! Great use of text, images, and interactive pacing.

I'm glad the compression tool was useful. You've made more use of it than I have. :)

P#68808 2019-10-12 18:09

Yeah, the xxxxx thing is a bug. It was a really tricky one to solve because I was running up so hard against the compressed size limit.

The xxxx text is used for the student chatter; I think if you advance the text while they're talking, it won't remove the remaining placeholder text.

P#68811 2019-10-12 19:19

@johanp, I can't find your font cart.

Ah, but this does inspire me to fixup my book reader to handle lowercase at no cost to compression. I think I can do it ...

P#68814 2019-10-12 19:25 ( Edited 2019-10-12 19:26)
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Cart #cotlk-0 | 2019-05-04 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License
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the font was taken from the Curse of the Lich King, which is honestly one of my favorite PICO-8 games I've found.

P#68815 2019-10-12 19:28

Congrats on finishing the September Spook jam! This one has big mood.

P#68816 2019-10-12 19:29

Ohh ... I see. Thanks, @greay.

You know a few weeks back I was pondering if it was possible to make a font that was 2-pixels across by 5 or so down. Seems like it can be done, at least for some of the characters.

Might have to do something interesting like this for my book reader, my own font of course.

P#68817 2019-10-12 19:51 ( Edited 2019-10-12 19:51)

Unfortunately, I had to hide this temporarily – while the author of the original story gave me his blessing for personal use, he wanted to run it by his agent regarding wider distribution.

I was hoping that it'd be a faster turnaround, but I don't want to rush it. I'll update as soon as I get a response!

P#69141 2019-10-21 17:37

Can always use my font, Greay.

I misunderstood. The story. Yeah, I can't help you with that. Now I am a bit of a writer and I've written several books in the past, but none along the subject matter here.

Here's hoping you get the green light for wider distribution of this unique story.

P#69151 2019-10-22 01:16 ( Edited 2019-10-22 05:00)

Beautiful graphics and soundtrack. I love the inventory system too. <3

P#74684 2020-04-13 05:19

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