My Pico-8 remake of the glorious Thunder Castle by INTV Corporation (1985) for Intellivision, with some quality-of-life improvements.
Manual
The vintage game manual is available as PDF file in the Thunder Castle Itch.io page here
TL;DR
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ move
⭕️/❎ [Z,X,C,V] Action button
Touch the flashing creatures (bats, rat and skull) to energize your knight in order to slay all the guardians (Dragon, Sorcerers and Demons). Collect and use at your advantage the magic objects that appear (details in the manual above or in the Pause/Enter menu choose "CHEAT SHEET" for a quick in-game help).
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Controls:
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ move
⭕️ [Z] Fire / Jump
❎ [X] Skip / Continue
Shadowfax + Pitfall! + Dragonfire
Dragowfall is a mashup of these 3 games from the 80's, in the style of Intellivision, all glued together to form a more intense chivalry-themed adventurous experience: upgrade your stats at shops, save damsels in distress, acquire knighthood, get married, choose between greed and Honour!
You start your adventure as a weak bachelor squire with disproportionate ambition and as much recklessness, to the extent that you volunteered to a deadly quest: you offered your loyalty to the duke promising him to bring back his treasures since the Dragonlord took over the castle and the rest of forts in the region will soon be its next targets.
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Hey @zep since you're testing version 0.2.6 on BBS I assume you could be interested in these weird bugs/glitches that are breaking a grand total of 4 out of my 6 game carts.
I immediately downloaded version 0.2.6 of the desktop app to bugfix them but they run perfectly fine on app!?!?
Links to carts having issues (unplayable):
Dinky Kong (featured)
Jungle Ping (featured)
Head-8n
Legend of Kuna
I think you can tell the intended vs broken behaviour as well comparing how they run on App vs on BBS.
As you can see the main issue (especially for the first 3) is that starting the actual game (⭕️ button) the _update seems to behave correctly, you can hear game sounds, while _draw shows the main screen (although they basically rely on the same conditions). The first two also show blank during title screen and it appears during the game. Jungle ping after losing a few lives starts showing something of the actual gameplay.
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Version 2
- Added Tutorial/How to play (❎ from title screen);
- Music: you can now play the music at a slower tempo like in the original game;
- Added: "Last score" in Stats page;
- Fixed bug: jumping while easing on ladders (thanks to Pico-8 Gamer)
Controls:
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ move
⭕️ [Z] Jump
❎ [X] Skip / continue / Start tutorial (from title screen)
Remake:
The original game for Commodore 64 is "China Miner" by Ian Gray.
(c)1984 Interceptor Software.
How to play
Miner Wally is the only person to know the location of the Jade Mines belonging to the Pong Dynasty in China. On each of the 30 screens you must collect four objects (pickaxe, candle, lantern and jade vase) before collecting the key to move onto the next stage. As well as the platforms to negotiate you must also avoid the various creatures that populate the mine and if you touch any of them then you lose one of the nine lives, are sent to the start of the screen and all objects reappear. There are various obstacles to avoid or use like lasers, moving platforms and platforms that disintegrate when stepped on. Falling from heights also loses you a life.
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Controls:
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ move
⭕️ [Z] Jump / Fire
❎ [X] Skip speech / continue
Story
Guide Imrahil the Kalendar Prince through the perils of many Arabian nights. On certain nights, he must gather golden jugs, engraved with letters, in the correct order to spell out 'ARABIAN' (the platform stages).
At other times, he rides on rafts and flying carpets through Arabia, casting bolts of lightning at his foes. His quest for the princess Anitra is long and difficult - many dangers lurk in the Arabian night!
Remake:
The original game for Commodore 64 "Tales of the Arabian Nights"
(c)1984 Interceptor Micros. Written by Ian Gray.
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Controls:
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ Change lanes
⭕️ [Z] Accelerator
Gameplay:
Two cars continuously drive forward through rectangular channels in a simple maze. At the four cardinal directions are gaps where a car can change lanes. The player goal is to collect all dots in the maze while avoiding collisions with the computer-controlled car that is travelling in the opposite direction.
At higher levels of difficulty you'll face more opponent cars (max 3). Every 6 levels it goes back to one opponent car but it's faster!
Remake:
This is a Pico-8 demake of "Head On" (1979 by Sega/Gremlin), the first game introducing the "collect dots in maze" idea. You can tell where Pac-Man took the inspiration from.
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a Head On demake for Pico-8
I started this speed-remake yesterday and worked like 7-8 hours in total. I'll have a couple off-dev relaxing weeks (posted the WIP so I can playtest) and finish it back home.
Arcade history: Head On (1979 by Sega/Gremlin) is the first game introducing the "collect dots in maze" idea. You can tell where Pac-Man took the inspiration from.
WIP:
Still work in progress but playable (infinite lives, no score).
You can push ❌+⬆️⬇️ to change the difficulty level (after a crash the new level setting will be used).
Controls:
⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ Change lanes
⭕️ Accelerator
Gameplay:
Two cars continuously drive forward through rectangular channels in a simple maze. At the four cardinal directions are gaps where a car can change lanes. The player goal is to collect all dots in the maze while avoiding collisions with the computer-controlled car that is travelling in the opposite direction.
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Welcome to the Pico-verse - a pixelated land of tiny horizons and even tinier characters. In the Little Apple, a bustling town on the seaside, something terrible has happened! An oversized simian sprite has escaped and taken a citizen in its cruel clutches! Making its way through town, it has climbed up the construction site of the town’s tallest building. But one brave soul stands forth, determined to rescue their fellow citizen from the dreaded… Dinky Kong!
How to Play
Select your hero - choose from Minio or Smalline.
Press ⭕️ to start.
Move with ⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️
Jump with ⭕️.
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A very silly and cheap trippy effect using poke 0x5f54 (mapping spritesheet to screen).
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Pico-8 demake of the classic arcade game Jungle King (by Taito 1982, shortly after renamed as Jungle Hunt, Tarzan replaced by an explorer)
Controls
- 🅾️ [Z] Action (Jump or Stab while underwater)
- ⬅️⬆️➡️⬇️ Movement, depending on stage:
- Stage 1: none, just jump from vine to vine
- Stage 2: swim in all directions while underwater
- Stage 3: ⬅️ run faster, ➡️ slow down (they can be used during jump) and ⬇️ to duck
- Stage 4: ⬅️ walk left, ➡️ walk right (no influence on jump)
The Game
It is divided into four different stages:
- jungle and swinging vines (with monkeys on harder levels)
- swimming in a crocodiles/alligators-infested river
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A couple options (totally different methods) to display big titles, e.g. a 'game over' screen or 'the end' in the style of silent movies.
Method 1 - Map and sprite tiles
You draw a few sprite tiles with corners and reusable portions to form your title.
Pros: all the advantages of Pico-8's maps and easy to edit your title
Cons: you need some free area in your Map and you spend tiles of your spritesheet
Method 2 - P8scii One-Off characters
You can use this spritesheet to P8scii string converter here to obtain a printable string that will display the title (or logo etc..).
Pros: no map, no spritesheet, just a big string
Cons: pick your image carefully, avoid one with many stray pixels (read hints in the linked One-off page) or it will eat compressed characters space.
Press:
- Z to restart the animation.
- X to swap the method (One-off gfx / map)
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Controls
- ⬆️ Walk
- ⬅️➡️ Turn left/right
- ⬇️ Toggle basic HUD
- ❎ [X] Hold for full HUD and ⬅️⬆️➡️⬇️ to inspect the surroundings
- ⓩ [Z] Open Inventory/Actions menu
How to play
You initially can't do much -except gathering fruits- more items and actions will be unlocked as you progress in the game.
So just explore the islands and:
- talk to the stone statue/head
- walk under palm-trees to gather a couple fruits if any
Here be Dragons
The writing "Here be Dragons" at the edge of the map means you can't walk farther at that moment:
the game map is initially just a small portion of the full map, next areas will be unlocked by defeating the enemy creatures, just report your success to the statue (Kahuna).
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Comic 128x384px example using P8scii One-off chars
A vertical comic strip three fullscreens tall
An example for the gfx method and spritesheet-to-p8scii string converter described here:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=49901
Please note, in this example the 3 screens are gradually less optimised for this method:
- screen 1 at the top has been cleaned up of most stray pixels and recoloured manually in some parts;
- screen 2 in the middle has a few minimal edits;
- screen 3 raw image, not optimised, a few colours but stray pixels increase the char count.
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One-Off GFX
To display fullscreen images with a PRINT command. It doesn't take any space in your spritesheet, it uses p8scii one-off characters all in one string (~3000chars if used properly).
This is an old school method widely used in the 80s (e.g. on ZX Spectrum): each 8x8 block had a foreground (ink) and background (paper) colour, monochrome but using the colours well would deliver excellent pictures for title screens.
Now, One-Off GFX is based on that method but could also have more than two colours in a single block (at the expense of extra chars).
So -differently from other image compression methods- it doesn't really matter:
- how complex the pixel patterns are in the gfx (dithered or plain)
- how many colours are present overall on the screen
It just depends on how many colours are present in each 8x8 block; better keep it less than 4 and possibly just 2 in most of the blocks choosing wisely while drawing or editing the pic. A good drawing tool to improve monochrome skills is Multipaint (choose c64 hires mode)
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Description
The demo shows how your PICO-8 games could add dynamicity to sound effects depending on what happens and the action involving your sprites, depending on their position, speed etc... not just use a few prefab sfx or playing several different sounds to give the impression they react to the action (e.g. a vehicle acceleration, spaceship thrust).
Presets
There are 8 examples (presets, select them with 🅾️ and ❎) of sounds and each shows a simple preview of some game action. To interact with preset previews you basically change the Pitch with ⬆️ and ⬇️ keys.
The Note
At the top you see the two bytes representing the note, their address in memory (it's sfx 1), the values in binary (help you understand how 'components' such as Pitch, WaveForm, Volume, Effect are stored in the bytes) and their corresponding decimal values.
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TL;DR
the methods to detect or inhibit Pause button apparently do not work using the Web Player Pause button.
More Details:
In my game Amidus I needed to hide the stage during Pause to avoid cheating as it's based on a short time to realise what's the correct path to take.
So I implemented a few methods like checking for btn(6) and even inhibit pause during that short phase with the timer running using poke(0x5f30,1) as you can see in the code (carts below).
As both methods work beautifully using the internal Pause P/Enter, both failed to work using the Web Player Pause button that apparently overrides both checks.
I tried to ask in the Discord #help and they suggested to report the bug here as it's an unexpected behaviour.
On this version you can test the "inhibited Pause" poke(0x5f30,1) method:
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Controls
Any key to start/skip waiting screens.
➡️ Right Arrow to Speed up the loop while choosing the path.
➡️ During the waiting screen at the end of every success or fail, use Right Arrow to -recklessly- advance Level (added for testing purposes but you could use that to test your skills at advanced difficulty, no actual benefit to score obviously, you simply skip easier levels)
Game Description
The 80's arcade game Amidar had a bonus stage every two levels, this pico-8 game helps in training your skills for that stage until extreme levels. The difficulty and complexity of random stages gradually increases at every level.
For those unfamiliar with Amidar: at first it might seem "based on luck" but it's definitely not:
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