I saw a neat algorithm for generating mazes on YouTube called "Origin Shift" and tried it out in PICO-8. Works pretty good!
This first cartridge generates a maze and puts a player inside it. You can move around. Pressing X will generate a new maze. The algorithm guarantees that any cell in the maze is reachable from all the other cells. So you can regenerate the maze around the player without worrying that they'll be trapped.
Maybe this becomes a game; maybe not.
This second cartridge was for debugging. The idea with Origin Shift is that the maze is a directed tree graph with a root, or origin. You start with a very simple "maze" and then iterate a bunch of times, moving the origin around, swapping pointers to ensure the whole thing stays a directed tree graph. But my code wasn't working, so I needed to visualize what was happening better...
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After working on this on and off for most of the year, I've finished my first PICO-8 game, Nybble Quest. It's a casual adventure game with a 4-bit aesthetic. It's designed to be cute and easy. Yes, you can die, but you probably won't unless you get cornered somewhere.
A couple years ago I was working through a top-down adventure tutorial for PICO-8. It was fun, but the 8x8 pixel tiles combined with the map size felt limiting. Early this year, I stumbled across a set of 4x4 pixel adventure game graphics called Micro Venture by an artist that goes by VEXED. That made me want to explore supporting (or rather faking) a map with 4x4 pixel map tiles. And it worked out pretty well, allowing for more map resolution as a trade for less sprite resolution. The source code has a link to that asset pack (and a list of which sprites are from it, thus not open sourced).
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Here's v0.40 of Nybble Quest. I think it's done. I think this is the final version.
But I also think it prudent to post it as a WIP for a bit before calling it done and posting a 1.0 release.
It's a small adventure game with a 4-bit aesthetic. It's meant to be a casual, low stakes adventure game where you can die, but you probably won't. (There's a surprise if you do die, so you might want to on a second playthrough.)
Talk to everyone you can for hints on how to play.
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Getting so close on Nybble Quest being done!
After my last post, someone mentioned the lack of music. Actually making decent music is beyond my grasp, so I grabbed 5 songs from Gruber's 2 volume Picotunes set.
There's another collection of tunes from RobbyDuguay that I might grab from as well, but I'm so low on tokens (27 left) that I would need to do some optimization to include them. Oh, and the ones I like use all four channels, so maybe not.
Anyway, here's version 39. Maybe version 40 will be the last?
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Here's Nybble Quest v36. It's very nearly done. All the loot, enemies, and NPCs are done. (I'm almost out of tokens, so they better be done!) I still want to add some detail to some of the wide open areas. And some objects need to be nudged a pixel here or there.
It took me 10 minutes to run through the game, but I know where everything is, so it'll take others longer.
Here's the map, if you're interested. Feel free to consult it while playing, or not. I ain't the boss a you.
The game is also playable via my web site:
https://tomcarlson.org/nybble-quest/
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I think my game, Nybble Quest, might be feature complete. I still need to add more monsters, NPCs, loot, and the like, but all the features are there.
In the final release, there will be enough NPCs to explain what you need to do, but they're not there yet. So here's what the player needs to do:
- Find all the loot (currently 119), so you can bribe the guards to let you onto the dragon's island.
- Kill all the wee monsters (currently 9), which will award you with a gold sword. You need this because the normal sword can't hurt the dragon.
- Kill the dragon.
- Return to the king, who will abdicate.
- Sit on the throne.
Here's the full map, as it currently stands:
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Here's my latest version of Nybble Quest, an adventure game with a 4-bit aesthetic.
Since the last dot release, I've put a ton of work into the map. It's not done, but most of the pieces are there. The city to the NE still needs to be filled in.
This isn't all that playable because only a few of the objects have been moved to appropriate places from their initial testing locations. The win state trigger is in the old location, but the king is in his new location, for example. The enemies are all in the NW wasteland. There aren't enough keys for all the doors. Some of the loot isn't really visible against the wasteland.
But you can wander about the full map instead of just 2 screens worth or so in prior versions. The full map is 8x4 screens. With its 4-bit aesthetic, you get a pseudo-resolution of 32x32 tiles on-screen, which makes for a lot of map tiles overall.
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So I was playing around with making a dynamically generated scrolling background, something simple, and I thought about layers of water, with different hues, and some dithering, by slapping strips of tiles to the screen. And that got me thinking about foolish billionaires and implosions and an innocent young man pressured by his father.
So, anyway, I made an extremely simple little "simulation" of a trip in a suspiciously familiar-looking submersible down to the Titanic, except things go wrong.
Cursor keys make you go up or down. That's it. There's nothing else you can do, if even that after some point.
There's not much to this. It's not so much a game as dark commentary. If this sort of thing bothers you, please don't play it.
It's as finished as it's gonna get.
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Here's the latest version of my very first PICO-8 game. It's a casual adventure game with a 4x4 bit aesthetic.
The gist is that the king offers you the throne if you kill the dragon. To get to the dragon, you have to bribe some guards blocking the path. To bride the guards, you have to collect all the loot.
There are enemies running around that you can kill. There are also NPCs to talk to and signs to read. There are keys that open gates.
The current map is just a testing area, but you can go through all the gameplay steps, albeit in an abbreviated fashion. There's an intro screen explaining the controls. After you kill the dragon, be sure to revisit the king.
I incorporated feedback from an earlier version, namely a larger buffer between the player and the edge before the screen scrolls, and a better way to restart the game after you die. (When you die, you enter Ghost Mode. You turn into a ghost who can wander the map at will, but can't interact with anything. The X button will then restart.)
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So here's my first post and my first shot at the start of a PICO-8 game. I had run through an adventure game tutorial with 8x8 pixel sprites a while back, but never went further with it. Recently, I was buying game assets that I'll never use, and I saw a neat 4x4 pixel set of assets (by an artist called Vexed). Intrigued, I started on a wee framework for it. You don't get actual 4x4 pixel tiles, but each 8x8 tile has 4 collision quadrants that you mark with the first 4 flags for each tile. So you can kinda fake it.
What I want is a mellow little adventure game with low stakes and low stress.
It's just a testbed right now. You can move the player around. There are 3 enemies that will come after you if you get too close. They're easily evaded and easily killed. You can draw your sword with the X button, but if you run into an obstacle, it'll sheath itself. If they hit you, you'll lose a heart. Lose all 5 hearts and you'll die and need to reset the cart. Wee first aid packs will each gain you a heart up to 5.
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