In NexusZero, you play as a Replicant in Philip K. Dick’s/Ridley Scott’s/Denis Villeneuve’s (take your own pick!) Bladerunner universe. The objective is to recover several memory fragments scattered across the city. While looking for these, you must avoid Bladerunner patrols (or escape them once detected). These are marked by flickering yellow lights, unless they are chasing you (i.e. you have been detected), in which case they are displayed as flashing blue and red lights. Obviously, your own location is the centre of the green crosshair.
One twist is that the Bladerunners know where your memory fragments are located, whereas you initially don’t. They will show up as pulsating green square icons once you have come close enough to detect them. When following normal patrol routes (i.e. when they are not chasing you) Bladerunner units visit the corresponding locations at irregular intervals, so observing their movement patterns may give you a hint as to where the fragments have been deposited.
In NexusZero, you play as a Replicant in Philip K. Dick’s/Ridley Scott’s/Denis Villeneuve’s (take your own pick!) Bladerunner universe. The objective is to recover several memory fragments scattered across the city. While looking for these, you must avoid Bladerunner patrols (or escape them once detected). These are marked by flickering yellow lights, unless they are chasing you (i.e. you have been detected), in which case they are displayed as flashing blue and red lights. Obviously, your own location is the centre of the green crosshair.
One twist is that the Bladerunners know where your memory fragments are located, whereas you initially don’t. They will show up as pulsating green square icons once you have come close enough to detect them. When following normal patrol routes (i.e. when they are not chasing you) Bladerunner units visit the corresponding locations at irregular intervals, so observing their movement patterns may give you a hint as to where the fragments have been deposited.



CYBERCRUSH
In Cybercrush, you are a netrunner hacking into a corporate mainframe to steal confidential files…
In typical cyberpunk fashion, this mainframe is abstracted as an old-school low-res icon-based grid of swappable binary numbers (which you are naturally accessing through a glitchy old cyberdeck ;-)
The rules are simple: you steal files by matching identical binary icons (there are four: 00, 01, 10 and 11) in multiples of 4 (so 4, 8, 12 etc.) Doing so is called a hack: the files are downloaded, then erased from the corporate database. The higher the number of tiles in the group, the more advanced the hack and the more files are transfered. In summary: the first four binary icons are worth one file each, the next four (i.e. 5 to 8) are worth two files each, the next four (9 to 12) are worth four files each and so on and so forth. For example, matching 12 icons increases your tally by 4 x (1+2+4) = 28 files, 16 icons by 4 x (1+2+4+8) = 60 files!

“Picosolo” is best thought of as a puzzle game with a climbing theme. The objective is to reach the top of a 24 m high rock face.
You do so by moving your hands and feet to find suitable holds. Your limbs are controlled using the arrow keys. You cycle through them by pressing the “Z” key (the selected hand or foot is highlighted by a pulsing icon).
The most important rule to remember is that when you press the “Z” key, you need to have at least two good holds (indicated by a bright green “+” on the corresponding hand or foot). If you have only one, you fall and the game ends.
Other than this, there are some constraints about where your limbs can be positioned (relative to your body). In summary, your left hand must always be above and/or to the left of your centre of gravity (roughly located at the waist of the on-screen character). Your right foot must be below and to the right etc. You also cannot cross arms or legs, so only one hand can be directly above your head and one foot directly underneath you. Obviously, limbs have a limited reach: they can neither extend beyond 4 “cells” of your body, nor be less than two “cells” from your waist. The game will only allow you to move your hands and feet to valid locations, so the best and easiest way to “get a feel” for this is to play it!
# Picotéras
by Fuchikoma71
Introduction:
As Eriban, fellow Pico-8 developer and code optimiser extraordinaire (very much unlike me) once observed, I have a habit of creating the completely wrong kind of Pico-8 games: slow-paced, physically accurate, complex and austere simulators. Picotéras is the latest in this slowly extending line of misfits.
I have long held the ambition of creating some sort of 4X analogue in Pico-8. However, it quickly became obvious that compromise would be necessary to make it playable. I ended up keeping the gigantic scale, every game spanning centuries (or even millenia) and dozens of star systems, but simplifying the core mechanics of the genre.




This project is a bit of a self-inflicted ordeal... I set off to make the nerdiest, most minimalistic, least aesthetically pleasing game possible (complete with annoying simulated screen glitches).
Here is how it works:
At the top of the screen is a list of 16 ternary values, "?" (undetermined) "0" or "1" (they all start as "?"). The objective is to change these values until they match a randomly generated binary sequence (i.e. containing only "1" and "0"). You navigate through the sequence using the "left" and "right" arrow keys. Changing a value is done using the "up" and "down" arrow keys.
The way you guess the sequence (or key) is by looking at the generated binary strings that cascade down the screen. The first string (hidden behind the key) always contains one single "0" (located at a random index, where your cursor is also initially positioned). Each subsequent string/line contains one more bit. The way the sequence grows from line to line obeys the rules defined by the key. If the key value at one particular index is "0", then if the string grows from that index, it will be appended to the left. If it's "1", it will be appended to the right. Furthermore, the newly generated bit is the opposite of the "parent" bit from which it grows, so the second line (generated using the single "0" in the first one) always contains a "0" and a "1". If it is "10", then it means that the value of the key at the index at which the seed "0" is located is "0" (the "1" was added to the left of the seed). If it is "01", then the value of the key is "1" (grow to the right). For each subsequent line, a randomly chosen bit is used as the "parent" bit, until the complete string of 16 bits is generated (bottom line). The new bit is always inserted immediately to the left or right of the parent bit (so if the parent is not located on the edge of the string, other existing bits are "pushed" into the corresponding direction). Obviously, the sequence cannot grow "off-screen", so the resulting string is shifted as needed.
Because the parent bit used to grow the next line is often ambiguous (for instance, "1001" can be generated from "101" by adding one "0" to the right of the first "1" or to the left of the last "1", you will almost always need several cascades to reconstruct the entire key. Generating a new cascade is done by hitting the "z" key. Finally, you can check the accuracy of your guess by hitting the "x" key (each erroneous bit will be marked by a "!"). To return to the game, hit "x" again. Obviously, players who wish to challenge themselves should use the "z" and "x" keys with parsimony (ideally only checking the key when all bits have been guessed).
Enjoy the brain torture!
BTW, this version was compiled with the Pocket C.H.I.P. version of Pico-8, which IMHO makes the game the perfect companion to the cyberpunk mod of the C.H.I.P. ;-)



Updated with some interface improvements suggested by aaaidan:
-
When hovering with the selection cursor over a city, the two other cities with which it is paired (those with which it "exchanges" traffic) are "highlighted", i.e. they are drawn with a white number on a black background (negative image). This function is disabled while holding "z" down (e.g. when planning a new line).
- When the cost of a planned line exceeds the current budget, the additional (unaffordable) segments are drawn as a dashed (not continuous) line.
For the previous update (V1.2), see: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30979
For the "complete" manual, please refer to the original post: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30916

Version 1.2
- All known bugs have been fixed.
- The pricing scheme has been overhauled to make it simpler and more useful. The ticket price is now charged when leaving the point of origin and the value is linearly proportional to the distance to the destination, independently of the route taken (multiplied by the "class of travel" factor, whether the whole journey is by Shinkansen or not). For instance, if the distance is 6 "blocks", 4 of which are on fast trains and 2 on slow trains, the total fare is still 30,000 (if the price is left to the default 5,000). If using only slow trains, it would have been 6,000 in total.
- The decision function to take the Shinkansen (or not) is now nonlinear. Travelers will choose the fast train option if the increase in price is lower than or equal to the square of the reduction in journey duration. For instance, if the duration is reduced by a factor 3 and the price is increased by a factor 5 (default), the traveler will still choose the fast option (5 < 3^2 = 9). This makes the price adjustment function more usable (i.e. it is easier to "convince" travelers to use the Shinkansen for only part of their journey through a small fare reduction).
For the "complete" manual, please refer to the original post: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30916
Also...



“Shinkansen” is more of a “love letter” to the people (and railways!) of Japan than an actual game, but hopefully it is still at least mildly challenging and entertaining to play…
You are in charge of orchestrating the progressive replacement of the “conventional” railway of a “Fantasy Japan” (each game takes place on a procedurally generated island that bears little topographical resemblance to the real Land of the Rising Sun) with high-speed “bullet train” lines. Your career spans what could be considered Japan’s “golden era”, the 25 years from 1964 (historical introduction of the first Shinkansen) to 1989.
Each map features 16 cities and the inhabitants’ travel pattern is peculiar: in essence, there are commuters between any two cities identified by adjacent numbers, e.g. between “1” and “2”, between “2” and “3” etc. (“16” and “1” are considered adjacent for that purpose). At the beginning of the game, travelers follow the shortest route using the existing (conventional) rail network (grey lines).
By holding the “Z” key while moving the cursor (rounded coloured rectangle) you can connect two cities with a high-speed train line, following any available route between them (you will not be allowed to move the cursor over “forbidden” terrain). It will not replace the existing conventional railway, only run parallel to it. NB: until “Z” is released, the new route is only “in planning”.
The colour of the cursor is specific to the line, of which there can be up to five: red, green, blue, orange and purple. Once the first section of a line has been opened, it can only be “extended” (i.e. any new section must start at a terminus for that line). You can switch between lines by keeping the “X” key down when pressing the left or right arrow key.
Travelers are rational agents (some would call them AI and they’re almost certainly smarter than Sophia ;-) At the beginning of each journey, they compute the cost/benefit ratio of taking the Shinkansen: in the game, the bullet train is 5 times faster than conventional railway. By default, the cost of the ticket is JPY 5,000 per section, which is 5 times more expensive than a normal ticket. Travelers will opt to take the Shinkansen if and only if the travel time to their destination is divided by at least as much as the fare is multiplied. In other words: for the default factor of 5, only travelers whose cities of origin and destination are both serviced by the bullet train will take it.
For every section traveled by one passenger on the Shinkansen, you earn the equivalent of the fare (JPY 5,000 by default). For every section traveled by one passenger on either railway (i.e. including conventional), you must pay JPY 1,000 maintenance and operations fee. In short: if 100% travelers use the bullet train and the ticket price is JPY 5,000, you earn JPY 4,000 per passenger and per section. If fewer passengers choose the Shinkansen, your margin will shrink accordingly.
Opening one new section costs JPY 1,000,000 and you start the game with a JPY 5,000,000 budget. A new line/section can only be opened if you have enough funds available.
The yellow “post-it” note contains all the relevant information needed to play the game and plan your strategy. On the top left is the year (circled, in red). On the top right is the percentage of all ongoing journeys that use the Shinkansen. The other two numbers below are respectively the annual profit/loss (reset at the beginning of each year) and the current treasury, both in thousands of JPY.
The last section at the bottom of the “post-it” note is the current Shinkansen fare (displayed on a white/green background, my best yet pitiful attempt at reproducing an authentic JR ticket!). You change the fare (by JPY 100 increments/decrements) by holding the “X” key down while pressing the up or down arrow key. By making the necessary calculations, you can adjust it down to attract more passengers, but it will of course reduce your margin. The limits are JPY 1,000 (below which you cannot possibly break even) and JPY 5,000 (above which every traveler will choose the conventional railway over the bullet train).
This is a "sandbox" game, so you set your own objective: get 100% travelers on the Shinkansen, reach the 31,999,000 treasury limit as early as possible, use the fewest possible lines to service the whole country…
The number of travelers increases over time (by one unit every year) to reflect Japan’s booming economy. In Jan 1965, one traveler is added to the population commuting between cities “1” and “2”, in Jan 1966, it’s between “2” and “3” and so forth.
P.S. This project took longer to complete than expected and as a result, the code is rather messy... Sincere apologies to my fellow programmers with higher standards!



“Picroisières” is a procedural sailing simulator. Every time you play the game, a new unique archipelago and new weather conditions (wind direction and speed) will be created. Although the map will always look roughly similar, the shape and location of islands should be sufficiently different to keep route planning interesting.
There are two screens: Map and Compass. Toggle between the two by hitting the “Z” key (FR: “W”, DE: “Y”).
Controls are very simple: you only control steering and “power”. Think of the latter as an abstraction for all the trimming, sail changes etc.
Steering is done using the left (port) and right (starboard) arrow keys. “Power” is increased or decreased (by 5% increments) by pressing the up and down arrow keys respectively.
Your boat is a racer: it can easily reach over 15 knots in strong wind! However, sailing at higher speed risks damaging your ship. At 20 knots, a critical failure will statistically occur after approximately 4 hours (game time). At 25 knots (hard to reach but not impossible), after only 45 minutes. Note that this is a probabilistic event, so if you’re unlucky, you could suffer a breakdown much quicker (and vice versa). To be safe, reduce “power” to stay well under 20 knots, where the chance of damage is very low…
The game consists in completing a course through 4 waypoints or gates, in the prescribed order, then coming back to your starting point. Each gate (NW, NE, SE, SW) is marked by a red “+” sign on the map. The next waypoint you must reach emits a “pulsating” signal. The gates are not buoys: you don’t go around them, you must sail “through” them. When you clear a gate, the symbol turns green and the next waypoint is automatically selected. After you clear the last (SW) waypoint, you must return to the starting box.
In “Picroisières”, you race against the clock. The timer starts when you exit the starting box and stops when you re-enter it (after completing the course). Leaving the starting box again restarts the clock, so you can compete against yourself (try to improve your time) or challenge a friend (hot seat).
As in real life, weather (windspeed and direction) changes continuously (and randomly) over time. Before you first exit the starting box, you can randomise the weather as many times as you want by hitting the “X” key (as if choosing the day on which to go sailing). Once the “race” has started, this option becomes unavailable.
White and light blue indicate a safe depth, if you ever enter dark blue or yellow, you will beach your boat (this effectively ends the game as you can no longer manoeuvre in any way). A black symbol at the centre of the screen marks your current position. A black vector (to the edge of the screen) plots your course following the current heading.
If you suffer a breakdown (as a result of sailing at excessive speed), your “power” drops to a maximum of 20% (jury rig) and the drag coefficient of your boat is multiplied by two. Needless to say this makes you rather slow! You must limp back to the starting box (automatically selected in case of damage). When you leave the starting box again, you boat will be repaired.
The map has periodic boundary conditions, which means you can pretty much sail indefinitely in any direction (the archipelago just “repeats” itself). Of course, the gates remain where they are, i.e. you cannot reach the SW gate by sailing NE!
The Compass also shows your heading (CRS), speed (SPD) and the apparent windspeed (WND), as well as the current “power” level. The light blue arrow is the apparent wind direction (taking into account boat speed), the dark blue one is the true wind direction (both obviously overlap when motionless).
Enjoy!


A little demo of Polya's Urn's somewhat counter-intuitive dynamics...
The single rule is: draw a marble at random then put it back and add a second marble of the same colour. Although there is an obvious positive feedback involved ("rich becomes richer"), it turns out that a strongly uneven distribution is not particularly likely!
In “Jodorowsky’s Sandmaster”, you play the role of a titular “Sandmaster” on Arrakis, the desert planet in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” universe. I imagined this game many years ago. I first implemented it in TurboPascal in the 1990’s, and have since then created a Java version. The obvious next step was to do it in Pico-8.
I called it “Jodorowsky’s Sandmaster” in tribute to this visionary director’s failed attempt at making a motion picture out of Herbert’s landmark Sci-Fi novel in the 1970’s (an epic story recounted in Frank Pavich’s 2014 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, which I all-heartedly recommend). I drew inspiration from Jodorowsky’s work in redesigning my game, for instance by making the spice a pulsating, organic, psychedelic blue instead of the more conventional cinnamon brown. The patterns in the sand are also meant to be reminiscent of Chris Foss’s “fishskin” spaceship designs. Of course, none of the great artists who were involved in this ill-fated movie project were involved in my modest game. Should Mr Jodorowsky become aware of it and not wish to be associated with it, I will of course remove his name…
In Frank Herbert’s universe, the Sandmaster is the person in charge of supervising spice mining operations. In the game, you pilot a “carryall”, an airborne vehicle tasked with transporting the spice-mining harvesters to extraction sites. The controls are very simple: the arrow keys set the direction of movement. Hitting the key pointing opposite to the current heading brings the carryall to a halt (hovering). Hitting the “Z” key will do one of 3 things: if above a spice-blow, it will lower a harvester (which immediately start collecting the precious substance), if above an already deployed harvester, it will lift it from the ground. Finally, if above open desert, it will drop a “thumper”.
The difficulty (as everyone familiar with the book will know) is that giant worms roam the desert of Arrakis and search and destroy any object producing a rhythmic noise, such as a thumper or a harvester. In the game, worms perceive vibration up to a distance of 16 sprites and will home into the nearest source. The game consists in finding spice (there’s quite a big patch of desert to explore!), then extracting it while luring worms away with thumpers so as to allow harvesters to complete mining operations. In the game, “wormsign” takes the form of a shifting disruption in the sand pattern. Worms cannot cross rocky areas and have to go around them. If a worm comes within 8 sprites of a harvester, the whole screen starts vibrating as a warning of imminent disaster.
You can deploy as many harvesters and thumpers as you like. Deploying a harvester costs 10 points, a thumper 1 point. Losing a harvester to a worm costs 100 points (this includes financial compensation to the workers’ bereaved families ;-), so look after them! Each spice-blow is worth 100 points if fully harvested, which takes some time: you will know that mining is complete when the harvester icon’s animation stops (it will still attract a worm though!) The load is only secure once safely inside the carryall, but you can lift a harvester out of harm’s way at any time (you only need to be right over it and press the “Z” key) and bank a partial load.
The game lasts for a 12 hours shift (countdown in the bottom left corner), after which the score (spice cargo minus costs) is computed. The game should keep track of high scores (enter your 4 letter/number identifier using the arrow keys). If there are harvesters still deployed at the end of the shift, the game will continue until you pick them up (or they are destroyed by a worm), but you cannot deploy new ones (you can still deploy thumpers though).
Enjoy, comment and report bugs please!





50% PUZZLE GAME, 50% PIXEL-POP-ART PROJECT, 100% WEIRD!
In this old-school cyberpunk-themed game, you are fighting to control the spread of a binary virus in a computer’s memory. By doing so, you progressively reveal the portrait of a famous ‘80s British pop-star. The virus is both friend and foe though, as only recovered memory blocks (those that were once infected) display parts of the hidden picture.
There are two visualisation modes: “scanner” which shows the whole memory, where infected blocks appear as “static” and recovered ones as bits of the background image, and “zoomed in” where both types display a binary number between 0 and 3 (“00”, “01”, “10” and “11”). You toggle between modes by pressing the “Z” key. In both modes, navigation uses the directional (arrow) keys. When you press “Z” while in “scanner” mode to enter “zoomed in” mode, the block that was at the centre of the green crosshair is selected.
While “zoomed in” you can repair memory blocks by swapping them. There is a single rule: you can exchange positions between the selected block and one of its four adjacent neighbours IFF (if and only if) they are both infected AND the neighbour’s number is one unit higher (modulo 4, hence “-P” for “periodic”). In other words: if the selected block is “00” it can be swapped with an adjacent block numbered “01”, “01” with “10”, “10” with “11” and “11” with “00”. To swap, keep “X” pressed while typing the arrow key pointing to the targeted neighbour. After a correct move, the selected block will have changed state from “infected” to “recovered”, the targeted neighbour will have become selected and their binary values will have been swapped.
N.B.: the epidemic pauses while “zoomed in”. “Recovered blocks are immune to the virus and cannot be re-infected. Any infected block completely surrounded by recovered neighbours recovers spontaneously. In “zoomed in” mode, recovered blocks have black digits on white background, infected ones the other way around. The selected block is highlighted (brighter). Susceptible blocks (not yet infected) are marked by two dots. From a fully infected state, there is always at least one solution (i.e. a sequence of 1023 “swap” moves that will result in all blocks being recovered). Good luck finding it though! ;-)



My first completed (or thereabout) pico-8 cartridge. As you might guess, I have a soft spot for "2001, A Space Odyssey", and this work is my tribute to it (and other "optimistic" Hard Sci-Fi, a sadly endangered genre).
The gameplay is admittedly a bit basic: you simply shuttle between two space stations (one in low, the other in high orbit), using as little fuel and time/oxygen as possible. The final score is 1000 points for each successful docking, minus 10 points for each fuel and oxygen unit consumed (both replenished after each docking).
Orbital dynamics are accurate, apart from the timescale obviously. Directional arrows control the thrusters of the Orion shuttle, "Z" is for docking when close to the hub of your destination station (the "selection" box will flash when this is the case). Delta-V is deliberately ignored (too hard to manage, particularly at this breakneck simulation speed! ;-)
Everything else is pretty much self-explanatory. Press "X" when docked to exit the game and see your score. The orange curve is of course your craft's projected trajectory. Labels on the edge of the screen indicate the direction of each space station (useful when out of sight). The "F" and "O" values near the centre of the screen are your current "Fuel" and "Oxygen" reserves (I kid you not!) Running out of either will end the game, as will entering the atmosphere (zero score!)
I hope you enjoy practicing your orbital flight skills!


