Hc Svnt Dracones!?
Yes, I know it's latin for "Here Be Dragons" but it's also the name of a furry-themes role-playing game currently on it's second (MUCH improved) edition, but that has a character creation system that involves some number-juggling at times as you start with an amount of XP to spend on a broad sheet of bonuses, and juggling the numbers can be taxing even for the math-inclined.
So... I re-implemented it more like a video-game skill tree, though without any deeper details of what the various parts mean yet.
Controls?
X toggles rectangles
Left/Right decrease/increase a given row
Up/Down switches between rows
Future Plans/Changelog
There's quite a few more sections I need to implement, and taken by itself this one 'screen' won't make much sense I admit; I do plan to implement most/all of HSD character creation on this tool as I have time.
Version 0.9b
Entirely back-end changes in preparation for expanding to more 'pages' to handle the other components of the character sheet, and eventually handling multiple character sheets in a single cart.
So this started on this thread by weeble but I ended up rather... running away with the code idea and overhauling it drastically.
While I've resumed working w/ Weeble on this in his original thread, I'm keeping this thread updated as well as I make changes.
V2.0 details
With V3.0 I've completely removed the concept of 'biomes' from the codebase; the walls, floors, borders, and their respective palette choice can be assigned fully independently per-room now. I've not yet modified the map to show off this feature, though as a side-effect screen-transitions are even faster now as the engine only generates those tiles which are absolutely required.
Also new is a full fledged built-in editor allowing you to modify the maze design with a realtime view of the room in question when customizing the palette/textures for each component. Note that editing the actual palettes used by the tiles is done by editing the lower-left corner (sprite tiles 240 and 241) with the upper row being palettes 0-15 and the lower row being palettes 16-31.
To access the editor go into the in-cartridge menu (P by default) and select the appropriate menu item; likewise to exit the editor choose to either discard or save changes in the menu.
I'm still working to improve the rendering system, but felt releasing this version with a fully functional editor built-in is a valid point where games could easily be made with this engine.
I have further ideas to add to this game and plenty of space/resources left to do so, but it is 'feature complete' to release as a Cartridge instead of a WIP at this point. Remaining ideas:
- More options; missile swarm sizes, enemy types to enable/disable, etc
- Attraction/Arcade Demo mode during the "title card"
- Improve the 'how to play' panel further
- More varieties of enemies
This is a 60FPS cart, vaguely based on the '16 gifs' SCHMUP in overall structure but written in a very different style using sub-pixel accuracy (including movement and projectiles) and circle-based collision detection instead of rectangles. The 'drunk missiles' are still using the same basic 'linear movement + circular spiral' pathing, but there's a lot more variety going on with spiral size, etc.
Gameplay is fairly trivial, hold down Z to fire, shoot down missiles and avoid running into them. Like many SCHMUP's only the 'core' of your fighter can be hit. The color shifts from blue -> green -> yellow -> red -> dead, and your projectiles match your current health status color.
X button starts a new game if dead, to avoid having to bring up the Pause menu every time, and if anyone has any further suggestions I'm open to hear them!
V1.1 adds:
- Persistent high-score
- Basic 'manual' panel
- Initial 'options' screen allowing you to disable the starfield if you find it too distracting
- Much improved collision detection
V1.2 is mostly bug fixes
- Converted from 'integer sub-pixel' to using the 16:16 fixed-point math PICO-8 already supports
- Fixed the 'hold down for an easier game' exploit by blocking movement inputs instead of only capping position
V1.3 adds music and sound
- Better 'death' explosion
- A simple projectile firing sound tuned to not be annoying to have running near-constantly
- A per-hit 'splat' as your shield weakens
- A longer and randomly generated 'explosion' noise when you die
V1.4 is mostly polish and overhaul
- Difficulty is raised as a result of more even screen coverage by missile swarms
- Credits panel added to 'attract' mode
- Code has been organized better
V1.5 is final polish and the last release in the "1.x" line
- Minimized the music, it was overly verbose and could be reduced to half as many patterns used
- A few minor individual-pixel touchups on the title graphic