Sybil's Tail is a tiny, 15-30 minute long platformer made for PICO-8. Run, jump, slide, grab, and toss your way through 6 bite-sized areas as you search for a mysterious meteorite that fell nearby!
hi there!! after 4 months of working on it, I've finally finished my first PICO-8 game, Sybil's Tail! this project was a lot of fun to work on, and getting everything to fit into the 32k of cart space required a lot of tricks to make things work right. a large reason it took so long was all the rewriting and compressing it took to get in all in there. but! the result is exactly the game I set out to make! I hope y'all enjoy exploring this little 8-bit world I've made.
it's also on itch here, which includes native exports, and the soundtrack. speaking of, I would like to extend special thanks to @kitorchid, who made the incredible cover art for the soundtrack, and @osmoru, whose adorable artwork formed the basis of the cartridge label design. In addition to those commissions, I also received wonderful artwork of Sybil from @MarziManed and @_pexl, who are both very cool artists that you should check out as well! And of course, I would like to thank all testers and of course my friends, without them none of this would have been possible.
some statistics (from version 1.0):
number of songs: 9
number of music patterns: 33
number of SFX: 63
non-empty map tiles: 3180
sprite animation frames: 99 (computed at runtime)
bg animation pixels: 60
number of object types: 25
number of in-game objects: 734
tokens: 8190
code size prior to data interleaving: 19435 bytes
in other words! for PICO-8, it's a big game. sometime I'd like to write a blog post about all the tricks I did to squeeze everything in there, but for now, I'm just happy to finally have it out here. hope y'all enjoy it!
[UPDATE version 1.1]
The game now makes use of the "secret" pico-8 color palette-- the result is far more colorful, while still retaining the color contrast between the day and night segments. additionally, balloons and ribbons now respawn, making the game a tad less frustrating. a couple bugs have also been fixed, and several have been added.
for the record, this is intended to be the last non-bugfix release for the game-- so I hope y'all enjoy it!
[/UPDATE]
[UPDATE version 1.1.1]
1.1.1 is primarily a bugfix release, and addresses the following issues:
- mobs can no longer kill sybil in cutscenes
- fixed issue where picking up mob and ribbon at the same time would cause mob to appear over sybil's head
- fixed an overflow bug that would cause credits screen to disappear after a while
- fixed issue where the sound effect for a hard post-jump landing was used for soft landings and vice versa
- fixed issue where sliding speed would not be reset when respawning
- fixed issue where respawn position would be noticeably offset while in fullscreen mode
- fixed issue where color of some signs would be inconsistent/flicker
- removed graphical distortion that appears when the final boss kills sybil. too many players mistook it for a genuine bug…
- color 2 is no longer mapped to secret color 4 during the daytime
- carrying a mob into the starting area during the day will no longer cause their colors to glitch out
- sybil's lighting now reverts to normal as she enters her house at the end of the game
[/UPDATE]
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