Please help Star Anise find his best friend in the whole world!
I haven't touched PICO-8 in ages, and I thought it was about time I changed that. Love the recent additions.
Cranked this out in... twelve days, I think? With three tokens and zero compressed bytes to spare. Phew!
edit: Now there's a speedrun version.


A Twitter follower has been speedrunning the game, so I was inspired to make a speedrun version:
PLEASE play the original game first! This one is missing the entire ending (for token reasons) which kinda ruins the experience.
The game should otherwise play identically; I haven't touched anything except the title screen, ending, and drawing a timing overlay. I even found a bug and didn't fix it!
Notes:
- Most of the times are in frames, sorry.
- The timer will definitely overflow after about 18 minutes, so, try to be faster than that?
- The game remembers your previous run, your best overall run, and your best times on individual segments. You get a summary at the end of the run. If you 100%ed the game, it also shows a star.
- The second row at the top of the screen shows your current time for the last segment (in gold if it's your best time on that segment), then your time for that segment from your best overall run, and the difference.
- Pressing LEFT and RIGHT simultaneously on the title screen will clear all your recorded times with no warning whatsoever.
- If you download the cartridge, there are some TAS tools built in as well; check out code tab 5.
See if you can beat my best time of 3:37.5!



i made an account just to tell you how much i enjoyed your game. exploring the world you set up was a treat. each luneko was so cute and you were able to impart so much personality with such brevity of words and interactions.
i adore this. your game helped ease my mind for a short time with everything going on in the world. you've left me full of wonder and smiling. many thanks again!


i wish you would have commented throughout your coding...this is exactly the kinda game i wanna learn how to make. but i dont know what youre doing in any of it and im just learning. this is far from a basic game so learning the basics doesnt help me understand this advanced stuff...


@picoternoob Ah, sorry; I genuinely didn't have any space left for comments :( Would you be interested if I wrote up how I made this game, from nothing to its final state? I made a lot of backup copies, so I think I could reconstruct it, and it's something I've been interested in doing for a while anyway.


I just revisted it and was looking at the sfx to see how it was done and Music(0) caught me by surprize! Is this a hint that you got totakka to do the sfx? :thinking:
Reguardless still a great game!


This is seriously a great game. The soot puzzle was great. The little power selector thingy gave away that I was going to end up collecting more items and abilities so I knew the second I found the jump thing I was in for a metroidesque back track through the level and find places I couldn't reach before experience


I'm having a thing where half the dialog lines display, then vanish instantly except for the first character. Kinda sucks since there's clearly a lot going on in the dialog :( Any idea what's up with that? I'm playing via Chrome if that makes a difference.


@PhasmaFelis oh dear, it looks like something changed in a recent PICO-8 release and bits of the cart are broken now. (the title screen animation isn't quite right, either.)
i have no idea what it could be offhand, but in the meantime you can play it on itch, where the player will always be the version i exported it with:


it’s really 0.2.5d that changed the parser and preprocessor: https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_changelog.txt
0.2.5e got out after one day to fix loading issue with lower/upper case


Yes, sadly it looks like this won't run on 0.2.5e on the BBS right now :( But the itch.io link works, so thanks eevee!


thanks @binarycrusader for suggesting the itch link.
i wanted to ask how to start the game, because the BBS version's title sequence not starting made ❎ and 🅾️ not work for starting the game
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