Version 1.1-- Managed to shrink code to under 560 characters, making this a tweettweetcart
Version 1.2-- Fixed game over glitch, improved HUD
Version 1.3-- Removed lives (falling just sends you back to last checkpoint), added control tutorials and background decorations, tweaked controls
Join Squirt as he jumps and bounces in the sky through varying times of day, on his way to Cloud Land.
Controls:
Left/Right--------------Move
Hold Z------------------Small bounce
Hold X------------------Regular bounce
Hold Z+X---------------Super bounce
This is the full version of my single-tweet platformer. It's essentially the same game, but has a lot of important features added, including:
- Animated title screen
- Checkpoints
- Control tutorials
- An improved ending (the original was by necessity super abrupt)
- Birds!
There's no sound or music, and no enemies, but overall I'm pretty happy with how much of a full game I managed to fit in a little over half a Kilobyte. Hope you enjoy it!
Slight problem with the controls, @JadeLombax.
It is possible to move to the right and press HIGH JUMP and it does not happen immediately. There is 1/4 second delay which if you are on a narrow precipice, you will fall off.
This does not occur for every jump, about a quarter of them I found.
I know about that, it's a consequence of the super-condensed collision code. The game is designed for you to hold the buttons down to bounce, that's why I crammed in a tutorial message a couple screens from the start.
Well if you can convert it from 591-characters to something larger, you should be able to fix that bug, @JadeLombax.
I will tell you that I have not seen any of these 560+ character double-tweet carts in TWITTER before - for the mere fact it would be difficult to copy one part of a message there and then another - and link them together.
280-characters makes sense as that is a perfect single message in Twitter and you can copy/paste easily enough.
This game of yours is great and deserves so much more love - everything Pico-8 has to offer without limiting yourself to 600-characters, perhaps make a full code version, that's my belief.
Still ... what you've done here is completely astounding for its small size and with that it is gold star work.
Thanks, this is actually the first game I ever made, and I made it so small to keep the scope down, though going this tiny probably made things harder than they had to be.
As for the need to hold the buttons down, changing that would probably require a major redesign of the game. Because the clouds all have rounded edges, some of which have a pretty steep fall-off, there's always going to be a risk of having a jump not work if you don't press the button at just the right moment, because gravity might not make you fall quickly enough to trigger collision with the cloud. Besides that, I think holding to bounce makes the game a bit better than it would be otherwise. It allows a number of interesting features such as variable bounce height, a slight automatic upwards movement when moving forward through the clouds, and the ability to gain height by jumping into a cloud, all of which keep the pace up and add some complexity. Also, as the game is rather large (160+ screens), pressing the button to jump every time would get pretty tedious. I understand the setup is a bit unusual, and I'll work on cramming in an explanation to hold Z+X for a super bounce.
As for expanding the game, I'm not terribly interested in doing that, as it has basically everything I want in it. If I get enough ideas to give it some nice variety, I'd like to make an expanded sequel without the size restriction.
I got a new revision up with explicit instructions to hold the buttons for both regular and super bounces. Hopefully that reduces or eliminates any confusion for new players.
As I mentioned, I'm saving an expanded version of the game for a possible sequel. Nothing to report on that front yet, but I have been doing some graphical experiments with the character, Squirt, so it's something I'm thinking about. ;)
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