There are, uh, dinosaurs, and, well, you have to, you know, sort them out.
This one took me a while! I've never managed to make a whole game about dinosaurs before, which for a die-hard life-long dinosaur nut and chronic game maker is kind of absurd. But here we are and I'm really happy with this one. There's a set of authored puzzles, an infinite-mode that generates random puzzles, and a daily challenge so folks can hopefully have fun doing the same random puzzle each day. I had a really good time making the art for this one.
Nice and quick. Only struggle was a level mid game where you had 6 dinos needing herd, and the solution seemed to be to separate them in two lots of 3 that somehow both count as herd, when my assumption was that they all needed to be connected. Maybe it's a problem with my English ? Does a group of 3 animals count as a herd ? It was the only level where I needed to split a group in two herds, so maybe that wasn't the intended solution and there was a way to connect them all ?
@RealShadowCaster yea any group of 3 counts as a herd! split herds is not used very much in the authored puzzles, its true
Great lil puzzle game! Good vibes and theme with some solid puzzles. For me they were a good level of difficulty, requiring thought but not taking time staring aimlessly at the puzzle without an idea of what to do or try next.
This game is awesome. I have learned dinosaur names. Thank you.
In this solution, the velociraptor(s) and the top tyrannosaurus are both happy and considering the other one it's prey.
Is that a bug or the intended game rule ?
EDIT : clearly intended, there's a campaign level I replayed with just velociraptors ans tyrannosaurus.
Small graphics suggestion : horizontal flips of satisfied animals depending on their objectives :
herbivores turned towards the grass and predators towards their prey.
EDIT :
I've played maybe 100 boards in infinite mode.
I'd say 90 were straightforward with extra room to spare, and amongst the 10 remaining, 3 were interesting.
I wish I had taken screenshots of the interesting ones. For those three, the board had constraints that made some areas unreachable by certain animals, so the obvious solution was actually unachievable due to wall/fern configuration and lack of enough holes, and unusual patterns had to be used.
For the campaign part of the game, the puzzles were interesting an progressive, but the sliding part of them was more an annoyance coming from the controls than a puzzle aspect of the solve.
These random levels proved that the sliding part can be used as an interesting part of the solve.
yea i agree, i also encounter a handful of random levels where i was like whoa i didn't even imagine that as a level hook!
updated the level generator to make fewer "duds" and updated the daily challenge results screen!
Really nice game. My only problem is that you have to hold the button to move the dinos. I have a broken hand now and it's hard to play with one hand. It would be nice to have a setting for that
@Meehaw oh yea totally fair that's a great point. toggle isn't the easiest thing to add but would help. Really what i Need to do is get brave and just get like mouse controls working for it so you can basically swipe guys around, but, lazy dev 😬
I just found out that I can see the source code and think I kinda fixed the thing I wrote about before.
Just add this in _init():
hold=false trigger_hold=false menuitem(2,"toggle hold",switch_trigger_hold) |
This anywhere:
function switch_trigger_hold(b) if b==112 then trigger_hold=not trigger_hold hold=false end end function is_holding() return trigger_hold and hold or btn(❎) or btn(🅾️) end |
In input():
if trigger_hold and (btnp(❎) or btnp(🅾️)) then hold=not hold end |
In move() and drawcursor() replace btn(4) or btn(5) with is_holding()
and in loadlevel() and hold=false
I hope that helps, because other than that I think its my favorite Pico8 game so far.
Also I was thinking that maybe you could make all herbivores look one way and predators other way. Now they look at random sides, and it could add a distinguishing feature to tell ones from the others.
@Meehaw oh yea carnivores vs herbivores would be fun for directional... originally they all faced the same way and i almost got away with it EXCEPT specifically the designs for the brachiosaurs and the gallimimuses, when they're sad, are too visually confusing. So I had to flip one of those, and once I flipped one, I had to pick other ones to flip, etc etc 😅
Glad that's all sorted out. Only took like, 230 million years give or take.
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