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Cart #wip_ma_20200831-0 | 2020-08-31 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Hey again. Goober here.

I've made some impressive changes to the cart! Here's some of the neat things
I added:

  • You can attack and kill the bats and pots in the level! For now they both
    add 10 to your score. It also makes this neat little explosion when you
    defeat them, with a cool sound effect.

  • The magic lantern in the cutscene now shows up in gameplay! This lantern
    is the basis of storing your currency, which is called Spheara. It glows
    faintly as it travels with you. The spirit of the hero's brother Coji also
    resides in this lantern.

  • You still can't die, but I'm working on it. If you're on the bottom level of
    the map and you fall through the water below, you'll have to reset.

  • There's still some oddities with the map looping and actors not really
    behaving like it's a seamless loop, but at least the foreground and background
    map tiles do!

  • The map was simplified to make it easier to build levels via 8x8 chunks.
    This does limit the amoutn of variety for now, but it's a fine placeholder
    for building as many maps as I would like.

  • While not implemented, there exists a password system hidden in the game's
    code which will be utilized at some point later in development.

Again, I'm topped off on tokens, which means I'm gonna have to find ways to
save some somewhere.

Tokens: 8190 / 8192
Characters: 43954 / 65535
Compression: 90%

Believe it or not, compression was actually hassling me too. I lessened this
by replacing the detailed map from a prior version to a chunk-based one. The
string size is MUCH less than the former.

While adding stages is absolutely no hassle at all (really only adds a handful
of tokens each level (like.. 9?) adding content for the game is proving to be
very difficult. I don't want to remove anything that is currently in place,
and I'm already scrubbing every nook and cranny I can find for any amount of
tokens I can save. I still have a lot I need to do as well:

  • Implement the other 4 abilities (Water, Ice, Lightning, Wind Magic)
  • Make it so Makeii can get hurt and die, and also get a game over.
  • Implement charged up abilities
  • Utilize an ability-changing menu when holding down and Z
  • Make a shield appear when Makeii is holding down and X.
  • Implement more enemies so I can make use of the sprites I made for them.
  • Implement key + locked door mechanic so you can leave the level.

I really REALLY wish that we had the ability to test games even if they go
over the token/char limit. While it is possible to still test carts over the
compression rate of 100%, it would be much easier to first implement all
of the content I need to and then compress and optimize whatever I can. I may
need to resort to a minifier to get everything to fit in there. Identifiers
which are substituting for numbers could probably be optimized that way.

That's all for now!

P#81391 2020-08-31 08:19

Impressive work, and some cool ideas here.=)

Since you bring up the idea of getting around the token limit, forum member huulong has actually posted about how to do exactly that in their latest responses in a recent thread, increasing the limit up to 32,768. It involves patching the Pico-8 executable, and therefore won't work on someone else's unaltered version, but it should work fine for development purposes.

Here's the link to the thread:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3205

Also, since you'll still need to reduce token count for the final version, it looks like you could save a whole bunch of them by assigning multiple variables at once, which saves one token for each assignment after the first on a line.

(15 tokens)

a=1
b=2
c=3
d=4
e=5

(11 tokens)

a,b,c,d,e=1,2,3,4,5
P#81397 2020-08-31 14:18 ( Edited 2020-08-31 14:31)

@JadeLombax

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'll be in the process of compressing variable assignments via the way you mentioned. I must have miscounted the token savings when I tried doing that last time because they didn't seem to make much difference. I already saved over 100 tokens doing this though!

In reference to the thread you posted, I attempted to edit the binary of pico8 to extend the token limit, but it doesn't look like it helped any. I'm doing this primarily based on the token/max value on the bottomleft, which still showed "8192" as the maximum.

P#81409 2020-08-31 19:34 ( Edited 2020-08-31 19:34)

Oh, not sure what the problem is with changing the binary. I haven't tried it myself, just read a bit of the thread. You might try posting there and getting some feedback on why it's not working for you.

P#81412 2020-09-01 02:24

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