Zep likes foxes
Pico Jr. edition
With Zep's RLE compression thingy you can now store an absurd amount of graphical data. This means short FMVs are technically possible, if unwieldy.
I don't know what to use it for besides converting porn GIFs to Pico-8's palette and playing them over an energetic chiptune backbeat, though?
Here's a fun little project. By "fun" I mean "nightmarish" and by "little" I mean "countless hours of headaches".
Let's network a Pico-8 cart.
This operation involves careful controlled management of the game state and manipulating the player controls with a wrapper. If we're using an HTML5 build, we can already manipulate the player inputs with JavaScript trivially enough -- there's an API explicitly for that one purpose. It also doesn't sound too hard to pause the game whenever controls haven't been received, although keeping a frame-perfect lockstep sync might be a hassle in itself.
But the BEST networking would involve allowing the local game to run a few frames ahead of the networked player and carefully revert and re-run those frames whenever changes in input are received, so that the game still runs full speed and remains synchronized with just a little bit of reality-bending when there's latency. This requires a deep, deep control over the entire game state, and the ability to run the game (without rendering) much faster than it's intended to go.
Fun.
Maybe I'll try it sometime. The license explicitly states I'm allowed to alter and use HTML5 cartridges for any purpose. If I can't hack around that, maybe I can make my own Pico-8 emulator that runs off of the .p8 text format files... although that seemingly falls into the legal grey area of the license a bit, since it would technically require fabricating a 16 color palette and sound waveforms similar enough that they could be considered a derivative work or some such, ... unless I read the same data out of a JavaScript file generated by the HTML5 exporter...? Gah.
That's enough rambling for now. This post is just a reminder for fun things to try whenever I'm bored next.
A partial port of Kid Radd from the classic Seveightgo Entertainment Unit (səu)
The original ROM is hard to come across on the web nowadays. They started mysteriously self-destructing sometime around 2003, and the ones that are still intact seem to have a lot of data missing... Forgive me if this replica isn't exactly how you remember it, I don't have a good reference for most of this.
Changelog:
Previous engine iteration (Alpha 1 to 11)
Working conveyor belts..? Just push the button!
Also some passive NPCs for fun. :3
This level isn't about fighting. It's about love, romance, and conquest. It's about impressing the other robot. It's about life in 2D, in 3D.
It's about dying repeatedly in a bottomless pit until you figure out how to escape.
There are two ways to win, and hitting the floor of the pits are an instant game over. (Feel free to use the menu's restart room option if you reach such a screen, though.) Yeah, I know this adventure is short and simple (it doesn't even need powerups, I just threw one health pack in there to be nice), and my artistic skills are still rather lacking, but I hope it shows you some new and unexpected tricks and decent gameplay all the same.
I would totally force an orthogonal perspective on most of the rooms in this if I could.
Just something interesting to toy with. I didn't realize you could make invisible items like this. So that's what this is used for, huh?
Please. Make all your event triggers more interesting with invisible sushi instead of just using the "close" trigger type.