I put together an engine for turn-based battling. I plan to use this for a boss gauntlet game I would like to do in the future or some other project. For the time being, I focused on laying out the foundations and would like to showcase the engine I put together, and maybe some of you would like to incorporate it into your own game. The demo does not contain any audio.
Features
-The general setup with numerous comments on the functions and commands (from a beginner programmer)
-Defense and magic system
-1 boss to fight with a Pseudo AI setup.
Controls
Up and Down Arrow Keys: Move the menu cursor
Left and Right Arrow Keys: Move the magic menu cursor
Z: Confirm action.
Notes
-Defend recovers your HP and HP in addition to getting less damage.
-The boss is not that easy.
-I made an HP typo on one of the attacks. Don't find it currently worthwhile to re-upload.
Disclaimer
I am an amateur at coding so pardon any inefficient or bloated codes.
0 comments
Hello. This is my very first game I ever made. I'm a beginner with no programming, music, and sprite design experience whatsoever. I came up with a simple concept that seemed doable and worked on fleshing it out, while teaching myself a few tricks and techniques alongside some tutorials to build up foundations.
Walking master is a challenging game where you, well, walk, through many stages, and get through the obstacles that stand in your way. The game features the following:
-Varied, dynamic level designs.
-Challenging gameplay
-Graphics!
-Music!
-Secrets!
Use the arrow keys to move, and follow the command prompts.
A lot of my coding is pretty bloated and probably not so efficient so pardon that. I left notes throughout the coding to explain what does what. I do hope for other total beginners that are using Pico-8 to learn how to code and make games can find mine to be useful and easy enough to understand. :)
Enjoy guys!
Note: Stepping on the tiles is pretty finicky. Try to step towards the middle and/or the leftish side of it. I don't know how to effectively set up parameters so I used if statements to setup a few varied conditions.
Hello, I decided to make a post because I have a couple of programming questions on how to execute or fix up particular things. As I mentioned in the thread title, I am a complete novice when it comes to programming so a couple of these questions might be dumb or excessive or a little hard to convey.
Weeks ago, I got a Pocket CHIP, and been currently enjoying trying out all the games, and trying to put a game together of my own for the first time ever. I’m currently putting together a game with my girlfriend as a player character (serving as the showoff motivator), which I do intend to just share the whole thing with her only. Maybe I’ll try the challenge of re-skinning the mechanics to publish to the site, though I thought I might be getting of myself there, haha. The game is a one-stage shooter, trying to fend off enemies as long as possible. Something relatively simple and not too crazy. I got the assets set, got my sound effects, tunes and learned some of the core basics through the Squashy tutorial in fanzine #1, and managed to a few of the basic parts working. The main problems lie with assembling it altogether and it feels so very daunting.
Since the resources for pico-8 is relatively outside of studying the game code (which 98% of is over my head), there’s a few parts I couldn’t find concrete answers to, and hoping you guys will give me a step in the right direction or point out which of the four fanzine’s addresses my problem, which I could’ve overlooked.
Here are the main things I want to resolve:
~Button input at specific moments~
This has been driving me nuts the past few days. So basically, the game will have multiple screens where the layout is essentially titlescreen > excuse plot blurb > main game > game over (then back to titlescreen). I set the titlescreen at the _init function and btn(4) to advance the screen. I used this wikia entry (http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/Multiple_States_System) for the multiple screen idea and managed to setup drawing the different screens.
Here lies my problem. Btn(4) is used for multiple things and it seems to be interfere with one another. I want it to be used for both advancing the screen and as the shooting button, but it seems to do one thing only or tries to do all at once. For instance, I played around with the setup where if I btnp(4) it suppose to go to the next screen. I did the if statement twice and used an and indicator to specify which screen btnp(4) goes to depending on mode I’m in. It either skips the second screen and jumps straight to the game while firing a single bullet or does not advance from the second screen.
I haven’t had luck trying to remedy the solution. I wonder if there is some way to assign a button for multi-purpose, depending on what part of the game I’m at, while disabling the other instances of btnp(4) in a function. Maybe it’s something to do with having all the other functions in the _update function screwing around.
~Bullet Limit~
I managed to construct a bullet via the dom8verse tutorial in fanzine #3 so the shooting itself is ok thus far. I didn’t implement the hitbox yet so hopefully that will go ok.
Only minor issue is that if I hold the button while in one place or strafing left to right, it’s a rain of rapid bullets. Makes things potentially too easy. I wonder if there is a way to limit the number of bullets that shows on the screen at once. Say, I want only 3 to appear at the screen at one time. Is there a way to manipulate that?
~Random enemy spawns~
I couldn’t find some info on it that breaks it down, and didn’t attempt it yet. I presume that will be the most challenging aspect. The way I envision it, there are two enemy sprites (with a simple 2 frame animation), and would spawn somewhere around y=128ish axis while their x position is random. What would be a good code to first determine which sprite gets picked then pick out where in the x axis they come from.
For movement, I’ll try to study up and tweak the pong ball movement to mess with walking patterns so hopefully that will turn out ok… I hope. Then there’s figuring out collision detection with moving targets which I did not really look into just yet.
Optional bonus:
~Saving high score and name input~
I thought it would be a neat idea to do that, but do not know how to, well particularly inputting letters in x strings. I’d like to know how to do that, but not really a big deal the parts mentioned above are a much bigger deal.
It’s probably a bit much to ask at once since this seems to be practically building a game. I apologize about it. I just dunno how to tackle all this since I’m an absolute beginner, relying on a few scattered cheat sheets, and can’t seem to find the solutions on my own. The concept seemed relatively simple in my head, but actually attempting it and realizing some of the complexities, guess I went a little over my head with all of this. Thank you very much for your time guys.
