denisbricks

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denisbricks

by denisd

Cart #denisbricks-0 | 2021-12-17 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

9

So this is my first ever Pico-8 game. The last time I tried to make a game of any sort was about 20 years ago when I developed a series of simple shooters in Macromedia Flash. This time, I chose to make a simple puzzle game as my first project, because I though it would allow me to get to programming quickly, without worriying too much about producing graphical assets. I only came up with any rules after I programmed the coursor movement and gravity for the bricks, so this game is definitely not the best in terms of game design, but it was only supposed to get me started.

Controls

Use arrow keys to move the coursor around. Press Z to switch the orientation of coursor. Press X to flip the two bricks under the coursor.

Rules

If you connect 5 or more bricks of the same colour, they disappear, you get some points and a few new bricks will drop down. However, if you manage to make a column of the board entirely empty, a whole stack of bricks will be generated there. This usually brings more bricks into the game than you just removed, which is important, because if at any point there are fewer than 5 bricks of any colour, the game ends.

Every few flips one of the topmost bricks will be removed. This will happen more and more often as the game progresses, based on the total number lines you clear. This is indicated by the "level" counter on the bottom. The level goes up every 15 times you remove a line of bricks, and goes up to lvl 11 (of course), at which point a brick will be removed every time you do a flip.

To the right you have a counter keeping track of the total number of every type of brick on the screen. If any of them goes below 10 you'll get a sound cue, and those bricks will flash for a moment to remind you that removing more can mean game over.

You score 10 points for clearing 5 bricks, 20 for 6-8 bricks, 30 for 9 or more.

There's also a point multiplier. It increases every time you clear a collumn (as explained earlier) or whenever you remove 9 bricks or more with one flip. However, if you do to many moves without removing any bricks, the multiplier will decrease. The multiplier goes to 12.

Notes

As I said, I'm well aware that it's not the best game of it's genre and that the rules are a bit clunky, however, in my testing at least I found it to be fun enough to be worth presenting to other people. I did a lot of my testing on an Anbernic device and found that the game makes a great toilet game, if you know what I mean.

I probably should've made a demo mode or a tutorial of some kind to explain the weird rules in-game, but I'm not sure If I want to spend more time working on this project. I'd reather move on to something else now that I have a bit of experience. However, if anyone finds some lingering bugs (I'm sure there are some), I'll gladly try to fix them.

I would like to thank Krystian of LazyDevs for his great tutorials that helped me immensely with this project.

Nice, easy, turn-based puzzle with great sound and animation, @denisd. You have my gold star.

This is pretty neat! I especially enjoy the polish and the particle effects. c:

Hey, thanks for the comments. The particle effects and importance of animations and "juiciness" was something that Krystian of Lazy Devs talked a lot about in his tutorials, and indeed the particle system in my game is basically the same as in his Breakout game.