I made this for my college art museum; they were looking for writers but I'm not really, so I said I would make a video game "poem" of sorts instead, and they indulged me :)
It was in response to an exhibit that included some "lost works" — pieces that are listed as being in the museum's collection, but cannot be located; instead we just had the label information of the missing work of art.
This game is inspired by that label information; I knew nothing about the painting other than what is there on the title page.
It's not much of a game; not much to do but walk and read. Thank you for your indulgence and time, if anyone plays it! It's short, maybe 5 or 6 minutes long.
Many thanks to oli414 for his dialogue text box lib which i keep using.
And to Robby Duguay for the song "Melancholy" from his "9 Songs in Pico-8".
And morgan3d for introducing me to PICO-8, and zep for making it (also I think I have bits of code in this from both of you.)
Changelog:
1.02 yeah I f**ked up on 1.01 it's all better now :S
1.01 Adjusted "GAME OVER" sequence at very end
1.0 Original release
this is really beautiful. what a wonderful interpretation of the title "abstraction". this is one of my favorite pico-8 carts I've played
I do have an observation, and this is not meant as a negative criticism, but it made me chuckle that it says "game over" at the end...it felt out of place, after such a profound narrative ^.^ so i'm not sure if you were going for juxtaposition there, or just trying to indicate to museum visitors that the thing is over
Thank you, kittenm4ster, for playing it, and taking the time to write back :) You know, that is an excellent point about the GAME OVER at the end, and I think I agree with you. Bizarrely I spent so much time fussing with it and trying to make it work and reload (doing so revealed some bad code I had made previously, so much debugging was involved) that I think I was forcing it in even though it felt out of place as you say.
I'll take a look at that tomorrow, removing it would be super easy, maybe it should just go to white, abstract all the way out...hmmm...
Thank you again!
daggermoor
This is a nice game! I second the "game over" argument. Just fading out would be a nice ending for this story. Perhaps you can make use of this effect I find really beautiful https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=29862
I loved this! So many creative uses of pico-8 on these boards. This is one of my new favorites! So pretty and well done. I actually really liked the game over at the end, though in a silly way. Some might argue that something like ~Fin~ would work better I suppose. I like the color remapping you did toward the end really effective.
sulai and sloum, thank you so much!
sulai, thanks for the link to the cart, I am definitely going to use that in the future :) For this particular cart I am so totally up against the compression limit, I think I shouldn't try adding in more code :S
I adjusted the ending, kind of split the difference on the GAME OVER. Thanks for the feedback everyone.
-daggermoor
Nice. It's cool to see "art games" being made in Pico.
I have a small comment.
-The Kneel button looks goofy if you hold it down, which is my instinct.
-Towards the end you're commanded to kneel, but I was already kneeling, so I had to stand up.
apLundell, thank you for those comments.
I forget that btnp() has a keyboard-like delayed repeat, hence the funny-looking kneel behavior if you hold down the key. The other was an oversight. Will solve! :)
-daggermoor
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