Welcome, Villager!
You are on this island to build a cosy little town for the peeple that want to live here.
Gather wood and stones to build and unlock other buildings. Some produce resources for you, others make your inhabitants happy. Well-fed and happy peeple produce more resources but keep them hungry or sad and they will leave. They might seem a bit lazy, but without them, buildings won't produce anything!
Build your first house and somebody will come soon, but there is no rush! Take your time and explore the island. There is no pressing matter, no harsh lose-condition, so be creative and build something beautiful.
Be good to them, and have fun.
This little game started as a quarantine project, partly inspired by my desire to create a relaxing city-builder and mostly inspired by this amazing tile-set by Cluly.
Can also be played on itch.io :)
Really great game. Amazing use of the palette and the amount of functionality is impressive
We start in Flower Village
To the south, a town around the Sacred Mushroom Well
Travel east to get to Mushroom Village
The Storm Tavern is close to the Mushroom Crossroads
Isolated on the west side of the island, the monks study the gods of the sea and the land.
I had fun and it’s a really pretty game! If there was one thing I would add if you still have space somehow is a radio you could craft, and then it would cycle between a few songs. And then when you break it it stops the music and goes back to wind/waves like normal. Just a thought though, love the game!
This is a great result of your quarantine project! I feel like you must have a lot of experience with UI because the interface is very elegant, especially with the user using just two buttons
Excellent - way to easy to sink time in this!
No save is a bit of a heartbreaker though!
Glad y'all like it! :)
In regards to why there is no save ... it's a mixture of reasons.
Firstly it was an intentional decision, as I wanted to create something in which one can quickly build a creative little village from scratch and somewhat always have it come out beautifully. It didn't feel right to attach to "that one perfect seed", but maybe it's just me.
Secondly it's a technical challenge. The island is randomly generated, there are a lot of objects in the world and it's managed partly via the map, partly via my own construct. I have no clue how to save that with the few numbers pico gives me. If someone has an idea and if people really want that saving functionality, I might consider doing an update :)
Saving this mass of data would require writing a cart (with printh) or data file (with the new -o command-line parameter), to be reopened later with menu or drag-n-drop or -i parameter.
It's beautiful, and I love how relaxing it is! I've had a wonderful time playing.
Very nifty! Here’s a view of Shroom City.
South Entrance 
Poplar Avenue was the hardest part. 
Thanks to your game being adorable and CC-BY-NC-SA I used it as an example for this
This is wonderful! I love your concept that it is a stress-free game.
i really really really like that game it reminds me with minecraft but better its so cool i really like it
I found a bug where you get stuck in a tree and cant mine out or move
fun, i like it! very relaxing! it feels like a pico8 animal crossing!
i would like it, if as you add houses people can spawn, who help you with the crops!
This is a great game, and everything is really polished, but there are two things I want to point out. First, you the movement is a little obnoxious. What you could do to fix this is store the last button press by the user in a variable, and then test the last button pressed against the buttons the user is currently pressing every frame, favoring the new button that is pressed. In this way, if the user presses more than one button down on a frame, the movement is still smooth, and you don't see the game randomly favoring the left button over all other inputs as it currently is. Second, there should really be a way to save at least one game. I don't know how far you could get with this in a single sitting, so being able to play across multiple sittings would definitely make me want to play this more. Best of luck!
The only practical way of saving would be to encode the world in some scheme, then print that data to clipboard. Somes games do that, it’s ok when you have a keyboard attached, but no help for hardware consoles.
there is a glitch when i touch the game screen my fingers for a sec(im on a touch laptop)
there come up mobile controls that work, but i cant see how many materials i have ect:(
What's the trick to getting population up? I've built workshops of all kinds, farms and windmills that my stone wood and food never drop below 999 for very long, but my population never seems to go up much.
Also, do road matter? I've got everything connected, but I'm not sure that actually matters.
For some reason the little villagers really like to go to the lowest portion of the map.
Seems like they won't move at all if there's anything solid 1 tile above them. So over time they tend to go downwards and eventually get stuck.
@joealarson
population increases by house, 3 per house. placing at least one road is mandatory to unlock wells and bridges but that's about it, you don't have to connect them.
Great game to casually binge watch youtube on the weekends while building the village. Over 400 villagers and growing!
Very nice little game, very fun, played for 3 hours lol.
Also I'm turning this into a video, I'll post the link once im done.
Everyone has beautiful and organized villages and mine is....
Promarcos_3, No, yeah. The organization on these life sims kill me.
This is a really beautiful game! Definitely gonna play more on my Pico-8.
Yeah, awesome game! Saving would be cool since modifying and changing the layout can always happen.
@partnano
Saving... Sigh...
At least here's a screenshot of the part I liked the most. It may not look like much, but the effort needed to arrange the trees make it all the more worthwhile.
This makes me wonder what we really want to save here. For some, it might be a classic save state, so they can keep building later, but I think that for most, a memento of what was created is the goal...
Let's think about both approaches :
save state :
How much data is it ? I'd say roughly 4KB worth of data, since the game is mostly tile based and has the classic pico8 half map 128x32 format.
There's a bunch of extra data to save like resources and villagers and happy sparks coordinates, but the map's island border is fixed, so there is really only 126x30 tiles to save (3780 bytes ?)
Maybe coordinates and look of villagers is not worth saving ? (of course there has to be some player who build mushroom mazes and prisons that would disagree...)
Data compression won't help, as the player can create in-compressible arbitrary data, but some packing might help. For example, if we can reduce tile id to 6bits (64 different tiles) we'd go from 3780 bytes to 2835.
I can see a few ways to reduce the number of tiles :
1st, no tile progress saved, a half harvested tree saves as full tree, partially constructed building saves as constructed, crop saved as fully grown...
No multi-value tile either : if a mushroom spawns on a bridge, it saves as a bridge tile, mushroom discarded.
Have a special "unchanged" tile type :
There's quite a lot of tiles that are generated at game start and can't be created later by the player or the game : stones, rivers, logs, mini tree bushes... All of those can be saved as unchanged, but the original random seed has to be saved so the original map can be recreated before being overwritten by the save data.
Crop uses 9 different tiles, all of them can be saved as the same value and a prettifier can be applied to round corners.
... To be continued, RL is calling ...
Reminder writing TODO
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cartdata /cart chain or self load with memory and different cartdata string ID
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Save as animated gif (bird and dog)
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Save as clipboard save like Islander pico game
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Save as big image (server side ?)
- Save as clipboard GFX Snippet. (Palette problem ?)
EDIT
@partnano seems like cstore is exactly what's needed to save the map. Are you interested in me adding the functionnality ?
This is lovely. Keeping pace on food is proving to be a real challenge.
Love this game, but not if i cant save it. You spend an hour getting where you want, then have to do something else, then have to start all over? Ugh....I will need to delete this from my playlist.
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