Once again, @ridgekuhn, your music has a distinctive "You can't do that in Pico-8" sound to it !
I'm not sure how you do it but when I hear your music it sounds like you are tapping some WAV sound effects. Clearly as you stated you are not so - take that as the highest compliment !
Well done. Gold star, and let us hope he doesn't have to hang on much longer and will be rescued. :)
You and me both, @ridgekuhn.
Much like the Sega Saturn when they wrote their final cart, I, too, once I post this final one I am working on. The long goodbye. I'll likely vanish from Pico-8 coding for a good long time.
A rest perhaps ? No. I will be writing the tools I need in BlitzMAX instead of Pico-8. The bridge to write useful tools for others including myself accessing CMD.EXE was crossed and that bridge was burned behind me - but not by myself.
Negativity is a terrible thing and sometimes even offered in small amounts can flare tempers - strangely by those who offered it.
I have easily over 4 dozen Pico-8 unposted projects that are 3/4 completed and just floating in the air - and I will likely never get around to finishing them.
I'll return to coding proper once @zep finally solves the APK equation or we have the new Pictron - whichever comes first.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=faq
Yet, I am going to finish this primary Pico-8 cart first. It should be well-received and does nothing outside the Pico-8 spectrum - and it can and likely will be expanded upon by the Pico-8 community even in my absence.
If Pico-8 stays quiet though with no new radical editions, I'll start to work in writing my own programming language, also written in Blitz. Also spend more time writing new chapters for my books.
Your song, "Hanging On" is perfectly appropriate for where my mind is right now. :)
By some, @ridgekuhn. And thanks ...
CMD.EXE is a way of accessing files directly. I wrote a bridge program in Pico-8 where you press RIGHT CLICK in a different frame and it would enable you to do such things as direct file access, in this case to compress files of a matched extension.
It was not well received by the popular and well-known curmudgeons.
While I have since benched the program, I will show you a picture of the new version I was working on and now am unlikely to ever release, once again focusing on releasing just the main cart I am working on - and then I'm outta here.
Well I'm glad you like it. Sure could've used your support back when I wrote it. I was pretty distraught then. Beaten up over it. Anyways, that's fine. I'm rambling. I do that. I apologize.
I actually write music too but only on a piano. Sometime I might write a type of screamtracker for Pico-8 that includes a full piano keyboard.
As for you writing games. I have no doubt you will return. Sometimes you just have to be inspired. Always consider the masters to be respected, Sony, Sega, Atari, and Nintendo as your teachers.
There are thousands of games written for the 8-bit Nintendo many more than 40-years ago that few people have ever seen because they are Japanese or Chinese. That right there is a gold mine of ideas to bring to Pico-8's light.
@dw817 Don't apologize, it takes a lot of courage to share your work and open yourself to criticism. I actually do have a concept for the game. I started making some of the assets months ago, but the project is way larger than Downstream Dream in scope, and I'm not ready for a months-long commitment to a project like that bc I tend to get obsessed and not take good care of myself, lol
Well thanks ... I definitely do appreciate your encouragement. And yes I think we all open ourselves to criticism when we post what we have.
It's sort of like a game of cards, you know you can't win, the MAJORS always do, but you don't want to at least have so terrible a hand that they make you feel bad about yourself.
I was looking at your Downstream Game the other day. While I am no good at playing it. I can see you put a lot of heart into it. Lovely game ...
I think I only write a game these days if it is truly reminiscent of the past or it has a strong educational flair to it.
A simple shooter, racer, fighter, battler, platformer - just does not do it for me - as far as me coding it goes.
No it must be a brain game, puzzle, highly innovative, or otherwise. I think that's a little selfish to be truthful as I only want to write games that =I= would especially like to play. :)
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of game ideas not yet written in Pico-8 that could be that would be well received. And eventually they will get written over time. :)
Here's a snapshot of one game I put on the bench I was working on earlier. I think I'm going to wait for Picotron before I release it though - or if APK becomes a reality.
The extra names, I was hoping to have someone write the sound effects, music, and maybe even some animation sprites while I do all the coding. I'd like to do that in the future for everything I write if the truth be known.
The blank page, I am hiding the instructions as I don't want to give away how the game works just yet.
Well thank you, @ridgekuhn ... I think they'll look even better with an expanded palette and pixel array for Picotron. :)
I can't do 3D though, I just can't seem to understand it. I don't think anyone has ever posted a tutorial written in Pico-8 to demonstrate, well, just how to understand 3D and make use of it in their own code.
I also saw something interesting sometime back in Pico-8. It was the ability to link objects together, like chains with gravity, or balls falling from the top, or 8-sided objects. They all reacted against each other marvelously.
That is completely beyond my understanding yet I can definitely think of some interesting games and puzzles to build with that knowledge.
However I =CAN= do databases, @ridgekuhn. All that lovely business software, interface, input, process, output, the works.
Really the very first videogame I ever wrote was text only and consisted of a 9x9 field which contained text words. A miniature database if you will.
At the time the words did not move yet you could navigate around them seeing only 3x3 of your area. Later they would move around and the area went from 9x9 to 39x39 and ultimately 63x63x16 for S2 where there were graphics in place of text.
We all start from somewhere and I think as programmers we all specialize in one area or another. :)
To be honest I don't believe it paid much more than other programmers, @ridgekuhn.
I think it was from my interest in business apps for the time I learned my rapid typing. You could enter my bedroom and hear clickety click all day long of me entering in facts and figures to databases, spreadsheets, and other related recall software.
I was just fascinated with grids, boxes, and numbers. I really didn't go in for the Space Invaders and PONG of the time. No, when Dad got a new business application, young as I was, I wanted to see that first.
That to me was the greatest video-game. The glorified calculators and data managers.
And as such my friends got very good at reaction type arcade games whereas I got better at typing and writing turn-based puzzles and games for that time.
Oh I did write some games that required a degree of reaction and timing, but not a lot. Not really. My interest and love in video-games will always be for the relaxed play. The cerebral journey.
That and I did play video-games for the Nintendo and other consoles if for nothing else to learn their construction, design, and what it is that interested other people in playing them.
For instance, Ghost Lion for the NES was a surprising and interesting RPG. As was Great Greed for the B&W Gameboy.
For Super Nintendo there was Secret Of The Stars.
I'm deliberately avoiding Squaresoft as I loved ALL their works and I imagine a lot of other people interested in turn-based RPGs and puzzles did the same. :)
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