Miracle Warriors Remake
Looking like I will likely hit the compression limit so will need to redesign or multicart maybe
Currently:
- bump into walls to gain XP and gain levels - to test systems
- slow moving through forest or mountains remove HP - to test systems
pressing X on some villages/castles will give the following - to test systems
- get ship1 and ship2 at the original game locations
- first cave (cave6) will give random item
- Kosama Village will give random equipment
- Castles will give random pouch items - guilders,fangs,herbs,reputation etc
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Resurrection village will give new party member if you have enough XP
- all maps should work although not very interactive
- healing system with herbs should work
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save system should work
- initial monster spawn system if press X in open .. you can only run away -- but their might be bugs .. sorry.
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NIM⁶⁴
This is a creation of the game Nim for pico8. Nim is a 2 player, mathematical game of strategy (well sort of). It includes the following features:
- Two forms of Nim are available - Simple or Single Stack Nim and Normal Nim with multiple stacks
- Beautiful chill music by @Gruber
- A campaign of sorts to work through
- Working AI and many different stack variations
- Single games. All games should be winnable.
- Low res mode because 128 is too much! 8)
CONTROLS
Should be easy to follow - Turn based game so no rush.
- Arrow keys - move about and select things
- (O) or Z - Main button to advance and confirm
- (X) or X - Generally cancel or go back.
Additionally the PICO-8 cart menu has the following:
- reset your campaign data - start again etc
- go back to the menu at any time
OPTIONS MENU
The options menu is a little obscure. So I've included a quick run through here:
Change any item with left or right or (O) button
- The Number Selector: You press (O) button to toggle between Random and Select Number mode
- v2 The Player order Selector: You press (O) button to toggle between normal, alternate or random player order select.
- Music: On or Off
- Game Mode: Simple (Single Stack) or Normal (Mutliple Stacks)
- Player Selector: Toggle through "Human - AI" or "AI - Human" or even "AI - AI" for some automated fun OR press (O) to cycle through Alternate selection (Default: player goes first then AI goes first etc) or Random selection.
- Display Mode: Squares or Numbers - Squares I think is best but both should work
- Number Selector: Toggle Random mode with (O) button -- otherwise use left right to pick set of numbers/game to play or the amount of random stacks in Single mode.
- Prompt option: Prompting or Automatic - Useful for AI vs AI to automatically move to next game.
- AI Difficulty: More about this below. Easy - Medium (Default) - or Perfect
DEV DIARY
I started making this game because I was trying to work out AI for turn based games and wanted a simplified game to try this on and came across Nim. I'm sure I have seen it before but essentially rediscovered it.
I also used Nim to explore the Minmax algorithm for Turn Based games and - yeah - that was a bit of an effort BUT I did get it working and can now understand it reasonably well with the alpha/beta tuning and all. I did create a nice prototype to visualize and explain it to me better also which I may post. BUT anyway turns out MinMax is probably not the best for Nim - it might work with some different kind of approach and more optimization (caching, de-duplication) maybe but I could not get it to work well enough. For small numbers it would work well but large numbers would kill the poor pico8 8( But I did learn a lot 8)
So the AI in the game is a bit more brute force which is a lot simpler and will always win if it can. If it cant then it will generally pick random although it will try not to make it easy. The different levels (easy or medium) mean that the AI will make a random move if the numbers are too large for it. The Medium AI should provide a decent challenge during the campaign but once you get the idea of Nim I would switch to Perfect AI and treat the game more like a puzzle game.
I also wanted to make a game in the lowres mode that was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the larger pixels and getting things pixel perfect.
Another thing I really enjoyed was making a campaign of sorts - Something I have never created and it was really cool and I learnt a lot.
I enjoyed working out how to use the cartdata and a few technical things around using that data. This gave me a lot of ideas for other things to use it for.
Regrets:
- I really would have liked to make each pip all free moving particles. Then the pips could explode and move around in a more animated fashion but alas. I have a workable prototype that does this but it was going to be a lot of work to refactor. I should have created from the start.
- I spent way too much time seeing if MinMax would work properly and feel sad it went nowhere but I did learn a lot trying to nut it out.
- Perhaps not a meaty and interesting game and it does not have that much replay-ability. I do find it interesting from a computer tech point of view.
- I need to get better at making music for pico8. I would have liked to create the music tracks but I could not get exactly what I was looking for. Thankfully @Gruber is an awesome guy and I found something that fit perfectly with what sound I was getting at. Please listen to the Jam here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=52518
Updates
v1 - release 2023-07-15
v2 - 2023-09-15
- lol fix the final ending
- add alternating player order or random player order NOTE: All games are winnable by the player
- default alternate single play and random simple playboard.
How to Play
The First Gloopadoop Invasion is a retro arcade style shoot-em-up. You need to shoot the Gloopadoops and survive at least 10 waves and defeat the mastermind boss at the end.
- Arrow keys move the ship - or you can use a controller
- Z or N or C - Shoot your T72 flame cannon!
- X or M or V - Shoot your AIM-21 "Shatterer" Missile - you have maximum of 5 and they regenerate
NOTE: you can use a gamepad or controller also. Please do!
If you get hit by an enemy or a bullet you will lose health. You have 5 health pips - dont lose them all!
If all enemies are destroyed or have left the screen the next wave will start. There are 10 waves and then . . . well you will see.
There is an Easy Mode if you are finding it difficult - keep trying the normal mode to improve your payback.
Easy Mode will make enemies fire and attack less and the boss attacks more forgiving.
Pickups, Missiles and Surprises
You will occasionally get pickups floating down to you - This is Metal - It will heal one health pip - Metal Up! - and also immediately generate a Missile for you to fire.
Your powerful prototype Earthship X36 can regenerate missiles roughly every 10 seconds - but you can only carry 5 missiles at a time as indicated at the bottom right - Fire a missile to do massive area effect damage!
One wave you encounter may be a TIME VORTEX level - spinning you into the warp and slowing time. You will need to dodge slower bullets and move slower - Slower might seem easier but .. we will see .. we will see ..
How to get Payback
You need to deal as much payback (score) as possible to the invading Gloopadoops - this is how you can do that:
- Missiles do a lot of damage and are the best payback really..
- Splatter attacking enemies for an double payback
- Killing tougher Gloopadoops will greater payback.
- Do as much damage as possible in a second to get extra DMG bonus payback depending on how much damage per second you did - missiles will be necessary for this
Your maximum payback will save - try to beat it again and again!
How I developed this game
I just wanted to share some thoughts on what I wanted to achieve with this game.
- This game was obviously heavily based on the basic shmup tutorial series from Krystman as credited below
- I wanted this game to feel more visceral and fun to shoot and fly the ship. I think the added gore really helps with that.
- I really wanted to emphasis the second weapon - missile - as a always available strategic weapon to help clear enemies as opposed to a more traditional "oh no!" weapon to clear bullets and save a bad situation.
- I thought the time vortex level added a bit of interesting difference to runs and sometimes they were easier and sometimes harder - the idea really came from a tutorial episode where Krystman emphasized slower bullets were sometimes more dangerous.
- I really wanted a different boss from the tutorial and it was a struggle but I think its an ok boss design -- I did persist with a weird use of SIN in the boss movements.. probably to an extreme really and I can see that really this is not really worth it.
- I had many ideas during the tutorial and am hopping to explore them in a sequel
Credits
This game, art, sounds and weird music was put together by TheGacko (me) - my first game - Credit also goes to my daughter Cosima for naming the aliens!
All code was hugely helped by the work of Krystian Majewski aka Krystman on Cherry Bomb as part of the Lazy Devs Shmup Tutorial on YouTube.
