Total amateur at this.
Is anyone else old enough to remember those little horse racing games where you just watch ASCII or pixel horses race and try to guess who would win, or the horse race games at the carnival with the water guns? I wanted to create something simple like that but I figured someone else already had. Lo and behold, I ran across a BBS cart that was just that kind of basic game. I loved the simple, colorful animated horse sprites in the cart and since it was CC4-BY-NC-SA licensed, I started thinking about how to turn it into a fully fleshed out horse racing game, and that's how Horseplay was born!
In Horseplay, you are a naive, fresh-faced kid heading to the track with $100 and a dream of hitting it big. Place your bets at the gambling window and see if you can take home some big winnings! Keep an eye out for a shifty looking guy at the track. Rumor has it he has some hot tips about the horses, but he seems more than a little unsavory . . .
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Not sure if anyone else is seeing the same thing, but both of the devices (Linux laptop, RGB30) I use for PICO-8 0.2.6b, the "New" and "Work In Progress" lists in Splore don't seem to update to match the lists on the BBS. I happened to notice when trying to load my new game on my RGB30 via Splore, but there are a couple of other things I'm not seeing either. Just a rough estimate from looking at the timestamps, this seems to affect the previous 12 hours from the time of this post. My internet connection on both devices is fine and I'm not getting a "Could not connect to BBS" message, it just seems stuck in the past. Not sure if this affects any other parts of Splore. The Featured list does match the one here, but I'm not sure when that was last updated so it could be affecting that too.
Is anyone else seeing the same behavior? I don't think this is just me, but I don't have any way to confirm.
EDIT: Someone just posted a new cart, and that does show up, but the stuff that was missing is still missing, so I'm really not sure what's happening.
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Word Zapper for PICO-8 is a mostly faithful recreation of the Atari 2600 game Word Zapper. The original game was published in 1982 by U.S. Games, under their Vidtec label. Fun fact: U.S. Games was owned by Quaker Oats, who bought the company to compete with Parker Brothers, owned at the time by rival cereal company General Mills. Yes, the 80s were a crazy time when cereal companies owned video game companies! Word Zapper was and is one of my favorite games for the 2600 - I even have the actual cartridge. Sadly, Parker Brothers had Frogger and The Empire Strikes Back and won the cereal company video game wars. U.S. Games was shuttered by Quaker Oats in 1983, a year after it was acquired.
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Ludo is a single player PICO-8 version of the classic board game. You may also know it by a number of other names and variations, like Sorry! or Parcheesi, and it may have led to a family fight or two way back when. Ah, memories!
The goal of the game is to get all 4 of your tokens around the board and safely into your home row before someone else beats you to it. There's danger around every corner though! If another player lands on one of your tokens, it gets sent back to the start circle. But you can also send your opponents back to their start circles by landing on their tokens. How rude! The player who gets all of their tokens into the last 4 slots of their home row is the winner.
Rules
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When I click Code below any cart on the BBS, the block is just empty and contains no code. Not sure if this is related to the recent styling change. I can't say for sure when this started, but I just noticed it today for the first time.
In case it's browser specific, I'm on Firefox 124.0.1 on Linux.
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UPDATE: Looks like either Itch or this person deleted the Itch account.
Remember that person from a couple days ago who was reposting the games of others, changing the author info but nothing else? Seems like their account here is gone, but it looks like that person also uploaded those games to itch.io. The usernames are different but they're mostly the same games, so I assume it's the same person. Probably worth reporting if one of these is your game! I know @RyanC and @krajzeg are among the targeted.
They even renamed Slipways to Symfowaves to throw people off the scent I guess?
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EDIT 09-22-2023: This morning, Lucky Draw worked briefly and then stopped working again, so I've changed this to a bug since it seems more like a glitch than an intentional change now.
A while back, Zep added a "Lucky Draw" sort to the BBS cart mode view that would pull in a not quite random assortment of cartridges based on a behind-the-scenes algorithm. You could get to it using this link: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7#sub=0&page=1&mode=carts&orderby=lucky or in SPLORE by switching to Lucky Draw.
I'm not sure how popular or even well-known it was, but it's been my go-to cart discovery method since it was created. I check it a few times a week to find interesting looking carts I haven't seen or played before. As of this morning though, it seems to be either gone or broken (it just returns a blank content area - if you change "lucky" to "ts" in the link above, you get cart view sorted by new as usual). It also doesn't work in SPLORE in PICO-8 0.2.5g, with an error saying "Could Not Connect To BBS" if you try to update the list.
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Prologue
PIXBURGH, PIXELVANIA, 5/13/2023 - The city has fallen. The dead pixels have taken over. You can hear them growling all around you. They hide everywhere & pop out when you least expect it. They smell you, they get hungry. Hungry for pixel flesh. You can outrun 'em . . . for awhile. The longer you avoid them though, the faster & more determined they get. They got Spot, they got Dot, and now they're after me. I'm the last one left. Well, me & my buddy Point up in the tower. He's real good with fixin' stuff up, but parts & power are scarce. Every now & then he'll hit me on the radio with a new place to hide, or to let me know he's got a few seconds of juice for the lights & fences. Heck, sometimes he even rigs up a bomb for me to blast a few of the dead to oblivion! Just hoping it's enough. Hoping I can hold out long enough for them to give up & maybe take out a few along the way.
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Hello, this is a slapdash remake of the Atari 2600 classic "E.T. the Extraterrestrial", except instead of E.T., it's Popeye.
Help Popeye call his ship and return to his home planet by collecting the 3 pieces of the space phone found in pits scattered throughout the forest then making your way back to the landing zone in the woods. But beware! Bluto will come try to steal your phone pieces, and Olive Oyl will try to find Popeye and lead her sweetie by the hand back home to Washington, DC. Popeye can collect cans of spinach which just happen to be lying around for some reason, and he can trade nine of these to his pal Elliot, who will give him a piece of the phone in return. Popeye can use his alien neck extension powers to levitate out of pits he falls into or activate power zones that let him locate phone pieces in pits (? symbol), call his ship (cat symbol), call Elliot for a spinach-for-phone deal (smiley symbol), or send any unwanted humans back to Washington, DC where they belong (III symbol).
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Revising my previous post and reopening as this now does seem like some kind of bug introduced in 0.2.5d/e.
On PICO-8 0.2.5e Raspberry Pi build running on EmuELEC 4.6 on the Gameforce Chi, select any local PICO-8 game from the game collection. You hear the PICO-8 startup sound and can even control the games (verified by pressing X to start a game and hearing the game music/sounds), but the screen on the Gameforce just shows "Loading..." even though everything is clearly loaded.
Originally I had marked this as not a PICO-8 bug, but it does now seem to be a bug introduced in the latest version. I first rolled back to 0.2.4c, which was the version I had been running previously, and it worked fine. Then I updated to 0.2.5c, and that also didn't exhibit this behavior. Updating once again to 0.2.5e reintroduces this behavior - games load, startup sounds play, game controls work, pause menu works, but PICO-8 is not drawn to the screen.
I'm not sure whether this is specific to EmuELEC with the Raspberry Pi build or if it's also an issue running on a Raspberry Pi (my Pi is currently in storage so I can't test it). Happy to try & dig anything out of the EmuELEC log files that might be helpful for debugging!
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I found this spoooooooooooky thing I made a few Halloweens ago.
Just like the videotape in The Ring, if you don't make someone else play this within 7 days, bad stuff is gonna come for you! Don't try to avoid your responsibility to pass this on, I'll know (because I have access to the play count stats).
The exit is on the left. Arrow keys/d-pad to move . . . while you can.
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Revision History
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1.1 (2023-04-29)
Fixed bug that caused 1-3-3-4-6 and 1-3-4-4-6 to resolve as small sraight.
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1.0 (2022-07-17)
Initial release
Synopsis
Yacht Rocks is a single player 64x64 PICO-8 version of the dice game Yacht (not the brand name game, please don't come at me, Hasbro!). You roll 5 dice (up to 3 rolls per turn) and try to score the most points possible in all the categories. Surely everyone's played this game in some form, right? It's a classic!
I wrote this because it's a favorite activity of my sister & I when we're together. We get very competitive about it! I only see her every few years or so & I miss her a lot between those times. I thought this would be fun for her to play & screenshot for me while we're apart so we could compete between visits :).
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Update 07-14-2022
The only thing I regretted not adding in the first version was a high score tracker, so that's in there now. You'll see your high score on the title screen and if you get a new high score, you'll see that on the game over screen. Happy unicycling!
Synopsis
Ted is a simple high wire unicycle daredevil stuntman. For some reason, the government wants him dead. Good thing he has a large sack full of bombs to fend them off! (wait, you don't think that's why they're after him, do you?)
Controls
- Left/Right Arrows: Move Ted along the high wire.
- Z: Drop a bomb. You can only drop one bomb at a time, because you are riding a unicycle on a high wire and it's hard to multitask.
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Hey, here's that thing you didn't know you needed - a stupid Halloween reskin of my already stupid game, Unsafe at Home! This quality reskin features Halloween colors and sprites, and a very slow, minor/off key rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame". Why would I do this? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine as to what my brain decides is important at any given time. But 'tis the season, right? Both Halloween and the World Series are happening this weekend, so why the heck not?
Controls
Up arrow: move forward around the bases
Down arrow: move backward around the bases
X/Z: hit a homer! (once you've got a bat)
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Unsafe at Home: A 64x64 baseball bullet hell time wasting experience!
In the distant future, Blaseball is the only remaining sport, as foretold by prophecy. One day, two friends run across an ancient document: the official Major League Baseball rulebook. However, it is badly damaged and the two are left to interpret the rules for themselves. Here is what these two friends from the future think baseball used to be.
- One player, the pitcher, attempts to hit the other player, the hitter, with baseballs. The book clearly says hitter, not hittee, which would make more sense, but these were ancient humans, so . . .
- The hitter attempts to circle the bases counterclockwise as many times as he can without getting hit. Each time he does this, he scores a run. He must stay in the baseline at all times. He can circle the bases clockwise, but will not score runs in that direction, and in fact must recircle ALL the bases he circled clockwise in the correct direction before he is awarded a run for crossing "home", which is what people called fourth base in those days.
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Seven Bucks and a Dream - a WIP slot machine.
Granny arrives in Vegas with 3 things: $7 in her purse, a dream of hitting it big, and an unhealthy love of the devilish one-armed bandit. Help Granny realize her dream of hitting it big by pulling this lever seven times. No, seriously, that's pretty much it. Once Granny's played 7 rounds, her back starts acting up on account of those real uncomfortable stools mixed with skipping her pain meds so she could enjoy the comp drinks. She's not gonna be able to move, and it'll be up to you at that point to choose "Reset Cart" from the menu or navigate away from this page to play a better game (or, you know, a game at all since, again, this is just you pulling the lever for Granny seven times).
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On the scale of important problems, I understand that this probably rates super low, but with the recent web player update, part of the start screen of one of my games has vanished. I'll show you what I mean. Here is the title screen of my cart as seen in the cover image:
And here is what you see in the current web player (0.2.1c.21):
The road that the cars are on is gone. This happens on both mobile and desktop.
I haven't updated the cart for about 3 months, and obviously I don't have this version to test with locally to see if it's something I need to change in my code to account for a feature change. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one that plays my games, so not a huge deal for me personally, but I wanted to flag it in case this is happening to anyone else with a bigger audience.
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This is a PICO-8 remake of the Atari 2600 game Haunted House! Can you collect the 3 pieces of treasure and escape the house before losing all your lives or running out of matches? How quickly can you do it?
Use X/Z to light a match - be warned, it won't stay lit for long! You can't see treasure or keys without light, and you can't pick up what you can't see. The monsters in the house will pursue you and will blow out your match if they get close. If they catch you, they'll steal your key and treasure to hide them in the house again.
Use left & right arrows on the title screen to toggle match flicker on and off. If you are a player for whom flashing lights/colors can trigger seizures, you'll want to turn the flicker off.
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I have a weird thing going on that I'm 100% sure is because of something I'm doing wrong, but I can't quite figure it out. Hoping one of you will have some insight!
When I run my cart, I have a title screen music track that plays using music(X), then fades out using music(-1,500) when the user presses X/Z to start the game. There's an intro cut scene where a different track plays using music(Y) then fades out when that cut scene ends, also using music(-1,500). The user plays, there's no music during the game but there are a variety of SFX that play from time to time. When the user wins or loses, there's another cut scene that plays music(Y) - however, for whatever reason, it only plays one of the 2 SFX in the pattern this time around. When that cut scene is done, the user gets the score screen, which plays either music(X) or music(Z) depending on whether the user wins or loses, but again only one SFX in the pattern plays. The user can then press X or Z to go back to the title screen, and music(X) only plays one of the 3 SFX in that pattern.
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Does anyone know if there are any good token optimization tutorials out there? Something like a collection of tips that show a suboptimal way of doing something and then demonstrate an optimized equivalent?
I'm about 25% through my latest game but about 60% through my token count already. Ordinarily I am much more inclined to finish functionality first and optimize/polish later, but in this case there is no way I will be able to finish if I don't clean up because I'll run out of tokens well before everything is in.
I suspect most of my problem is that I have a lot of tables and nested tables, like this:
-- this is 76 tokens total and I have a total of about 608 tokens worth of just these
ryl = (yl + (flr(yl/10)*1.5))*7.84
rec={rec1={x=ryl,ogx=ryl,y=32,ogy=32,sx=0,sy=32,speed=rnd(1.25),f=false},rec2={x=ryl,ogx=ryl,y=111,ogy=111,sx=0,sy=32,speed=rnd(1.25),f=false}} |
which I then refer to values of like this (adding another 26 tokens): sspr(oteam.rec.rec1.sx,oteam.rec.rec1.sy,sprw,sprh,oteam.rec.rec1.x,oteam.rec.rec1.y,sprw,sprh,oteam.rec.rec1.f)
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