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:
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.
Here's the full map in one graphic:
It's also on my web site:
https://tomcarlson.org/nybble-quest/
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.
It's also on itch.io and my personal website.
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.)
One earlier comment was that the diagonal movement was too fast, which is true. It is. The commenter suggested a cool solution involving running at 60 fps, doing cardinal movement every other clock tick, but diagonal every third clock tick. I did try that out, and it did make the diagonal movement more in line with the cardinal movement. But I just didn't like how the different refresh rates looked. It might just be that I couldn't implement it right. Anyway, I kept the too-fast diagonal movement. In the end, I don't intend for there to be large open areas in the game, so long stretches of movement aren't going to happen a lot.
Nothing in the game is intended to be hard. You can die, but it's not difficult to avoid that fate. It's meant to be a fun, low stress diversion.
I think the mechanics are done, and I'm about to start creating the actual large game map. I managed to keep the sprite count to 128, so I can have a 8x4 screen game map.
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.
There are gems and wee piles of gold to collect. There's a key in the NW corner that'll open a door to a tiny graveyard off-screen to the SE. There's some space off-screen to the east and south to test screen scrolling.
There are a couple test signs you can read. Either X or O will dismiss them.
Sounds are extremely rudimentary, and there are only 2 of them.
While I'm writing this mainly to play myself, comments and suggestions are welcome, keeping in mind that this is literally my first PICO-8 game, beyond some minor modifications to a tutorial a year or so ago.
