16 Greens
A bog standard minigolf game with 4-player pass-and-play multiplayer
I heard about PICO-8 literally years ago and completely forgot about it until last weekend. Downloaded it and spent the week having a great time getting to grips with it. 16 Greens is the first 'proper' game I've made so far.
Lessons Learned
- I tried to lean into the 'PICO-8 way' as much as possible; usually I'd make maps in Tiled and import them into whatever game I'm making, but since PICO-8 has a specific cart block for map data, I figured it was best to use that instead (I still used Tiled, I just wrote a python script to convert tmx files into PICO-8 map data). For this game, since I wanted each hole to be a full screen, this limited me to 16 holes, but I figured this would help me preserve precious tokens and characters. In hindsight, I actually seriously underestimated just how many tokens and characters PICO-8 affords you; I ended up under 50% of the token limit and didn't even use 20% of the character limit (after minifying). I'll try storing map data in code in future (especially since string encoding doesn't eat up many tokens).
- Minifying helped with the character count significantly (~12k minified vs. ~32k unminified), although obviously did nothing for tokens. That said, if I start storing more map and graphics data in code, then character count will become more important, so I'll stick with minifying for future carts (I used luamin).
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Really glad you enjoyed it!
> I enjoy the way the camera pans from one hole to another. Not many golf/minigolf games do that. I like golf games that do something extra to make it feel like the course exists in real space.
Yeah, this was something that PICO-8 actually makes incredibly easy. You can draw the whole map with map(), and then adjust the co-ordinates passed to camera() based on the hole the player's on. Really nice effect for very little work.
> My low score so far is 25.
Wow, nicely done. My record is 27!
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