This is my first ever game made inside Pico-8!
How To Play
Controls: Up/Down/Left/Right to move.
You play as the Yellow Square. Earn score by collecting Orbs. For every 5 score, A red square will spawn in the middle and bounce off the borders of the screen. The goal of the game is to collect as many Orbs as you can without touching the red squares.
Some Development Backstory
I originally wanted my first Pico-8 game to be a basic platformer. I then proceeded to find out the hard way just how difficult that was for someone just starting out and learning the ropes of the engine. I had to make something a bit simpler.
I wanted to create a small arcade-styled game where your only limiter is your own skill. This game ended up being finished in just 2 days, which even for a small for-fun project is quite quick.
I've always used GameMaker when making games, but I've been wanting to learn Pico-8 for a while as making tiny little arcade games as a hobby is something that's been a huge interest to me. I'm a sucker for simplicity, so an engine like this is exactly what I've been looking for.
My initial point of inspiration for this game was Snake, where you eat apples and avoid bumping into walls or your tail. I really liked the simple objective and the gradual difficulty curve of the game, but I wanted to add a new way of challenging the player as it can get sort of mundane if you know what you're doing.
I remember when I was playing Terraria's Calamity Mod, and something that I found really fun was dodging projectiles when fighting bosses. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to make a game where the whole focus is dodging things. So, I combined that with a similar game loop to Snake to make Dodger!
Credits
I made Dodger entirely by myself. (Discord ".shirtman") I only used the tools built into Pico-8 when making the game, no VS Code or anything of the sort.
Hey @shirtman, this a great little gem! I have added it to my RG CubeXX and it plays well.
I don’t know if you’ve already looked into this, but NerdyTeachers has a great platformer YouTube series. Maybe you can use it as a starting point.
This is a very nice twist on snake and the gameplay feels juicy! I think we all have these projects on our backlog that we just have started too soon don’t worry about it.
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