I've been threatening to do it for ages! And I finally did. I made a cart with mouse controls. It is a very simple game: click until you can click no more. That is approx. 32,000 clicks. If you're really bored and want to skip to the end, hold X and click.
That's it! I had fun making the number sprites and especially the cursor sprites. Just threw this together in an hour because it's been a very scattered month as usual.
itch.io page: here
1GAM August 2017
7 comments
Thrown together in a few hours but really came out well I think.
Z: Start game/cycle things to move (eyes, nose)
S: Randomise whole face
D: Change eye type
F: Change face type
X: Cycle blep amount
itch.io page: here
#1GAM July 2017
Controls
Z to start. Arrows move the ship left and right. X boosts, using fuel at increased rate to cover more distance
Objective
Cover as much distance as you can in as low a time as you can. Collect additional fuel to keep your ship running longer. Dodge the obstacles.
Commentary
This came together nicely, at a nice pace, over about the last five days of the month. I didn't feel desperately under pressure, although I came right up against the deadline. Nor did I feel like I left out tons of stuff and/or released a worse product for time constraints. I actually managed to squeeze in loads of features I wanted, including probably my favourite PICO-8 music I've done. Top PICO-8 tip: you can set different music patterns to have different speeds but have them play in the same 'song'. Huge missing link moment for me realising that.
I'm very proud of this game and how it worked out. In particular I think
the battery HUD element
the little shadow under the ship
the cliffs flying past on either side
all felt pretty neat in implementation and look good in practice.
Anyway, hope you enjoy! If you feel like commenting, please note the Lexaloffle board doesn't notify me of new replies. Find me on Twitter if you need me @PROGRAM_IX
Lexaloffle BBS thread: here
1GAM June 2017
Kept wanting to do different things this month, just like every month. Ended up working on this but couldn't think of any further gameplay that didn't kind of ruin the peacefulness. So I just left it like this, and I quite enjoy it. Perhaps you will too. Or not.
Controls
Z to start. Arrows move the gull back and forth, up and down, but otherwise players do not affect the game.
Objective
No objective. Just hang out above the fields and roads.
itch.io page: here (If something really bothers you about this and you want to ensure I read your message, post it there. Lexaloffle forums sadly don't notify me of replies.)
1GAM May 2017
Controls
Z to start. Z to flip box over to next side. Arrows move the barcode scanner. X scans a barcode. Z to restart from the game over screen.
Objective
Scan as many barcodes as you can in the 90 seconds allotted. Be careful not to flip the boxes too fast, or you'll have to go all the way back around.
Commentary
This game has been on the back burner for ages. The inspiration was trying to simulate a cube/box that you could flip over in a semi-real way, but I spent ages messing with that and ultimately couldn't make it work. It was a classic case of solving a problem the game didn't need to be solved. I changed it so that the box always flipped over to the 'next' side, so you just needed to carefully press one button instead of imagining a real cube. It's not as cool, but it did allow this game to happen.
itch.io page: here
#1GAM April 2017
Quick thing I banged out for #7DRL, sadly in the same week my own dog died. Guide the roguelike dog through the rooms and floors of this dungeon, which get ever more dangerous each floor. How far can you make it?
The main actors are:
Dogue: Move with arrow keys, in rogue-like fashion. Wait as long as you like between moves.
Skeletons: Creep up to you and damage you if you're next to them. Move into them to kill them.
Meat: Pick up to replenish moves. You only have so many before you die of exhaustion!
Hearts: Pick up to replenish lives. You need these for when skeletons attack!
It's that simple. Hope you enjoy!
I won't be mad if you mute the music, I spent about 10 minutes on it.
If something is SUPER bothersome about this game, a response is more likely on the itch.io page as BBS doesn't notify me of replies.
itch.io page: here.
#1GAM March 2017.
#7DRL March 2017.
Z to start. Arrows move the player. Z to restart from the game over screen
Sudden inspiration struck a few days before the end of February, and here we are! Somewhat on time even.
Steer your character through driving snow to find meat using your amazing food compass in the bottom right! (It points to the food.) The heat timer tracks how close you are to freezing. You need to return to your tent before that happens!
Hope you enjoy this quick little game, I had a lot of fun making it. Apologies if the sound/music drive you up the wall, I ended up quite happy with them.
If you comment and I don't respond, it's probably because I have no way to receive updates on this thread! Sorry! I will try to check it regularly for a few days post-release. The Itch.io page will ping me though, I think, so if there's anything pressing you could try commenting there.
Itch.io page: here
I'm very happy to finally get MATCH3 off my chest! Holy god. Been working on it since about June/July 2015, just coming back to it again and again. Similar to TRAIN. Ugh. But it's now done enough for me to call it a day and call it a #1GAM for January 2017!
Itch page is here.
Controls
Z to advance any screen that's not the actual gameplay. Arrows move the cursor. Z rotates the cursor 90 degrees. (It should 'just work' at the edges.) X swaps the two tiles under the cursor. You have 30 seconds to get as high a score as you can! The more tiles are popped at the same time, the higher your score will be. This game should not require any colour distinctions, although it will probably make it easier if you can distinguish colours. Everything is shaped differently, even the highlight that shows when tiles are popping.
Commentary
This game is something I've been working on for a very long time indeed. On and off over more than 18 months, though it certainly doesn't look it. I'd come back to it, try something, get frustrated, give up for months, and so on.
It's an interesting one. I got the basic mechanics of it working pretty early on. Kept getting a bit lost as to how many types of tile I wanted, how I wanted the end state to work, and persistent bug where matches in the last row or last column wouldn't be caught. (It was not an off-by-one error!)
Still a bug here or there, but I'd say it's pretty playable. Runs on a 30-second timer. Please enjoy!
I have stomach flu so the time that should have been dedicated to this was dedicated to that instead. But have this 80-minute game. Move the arrows to move your bucket. Catch the bricks before they fall offscreen!
It's been a busy month, and this is the only thing I was remotely happy to put out. I thought I could make parallax happen, and I kind of did, but then I liked the parallax so much I didn't know what else to do. So here is this chillout thing where you just fly your plane up and down and listen to the rain. Up/Down arrows to move.
Been working on this on and off for a while, wanted to actually upload some version of it and call it 'done'. It's a sort of roguelike where you have to collect coins and knives and hearts, while avoiding broken hearts. Mostly put together to test out roguelike movement, room linking, etc.
Z to start, arrows move.
A very short game put together in about three hours over a couple of days. Finding your best shirt can be tough with all these receptacles around the place.
I ended up putting a lot of time into the boilerplate of this game, going beyond my usual 3-state if-else block and adding a table of functions for updating and drawing, ordered by state. Also worked on an SSPR-based entity model. Not bad, I think.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Find your sweetest shirt! It's in there somewhere! Arrows move, Z opens a potential shirt receptacle.
Very straightforward game thrown together in about 80-90 minutes when I realised nothing was really getting ready/finished for August's #onegameamonth.
Control a rad person as they aim to save their precious physical media from the dastardly rule of scissors.
Arrows to move, avoid scissors, collect CDs.
I actually did sound effects (limited, but present!). Quite happy with the speed/completeness of this, full disclosure though I have a basic 3-state template (update/draw for title, game, endgame) which I loaded up as boilerplate so that I could maximise the time I had.
Enjoy!
(Accidentally ruined the first submission here, but oh well. May try to get that one deleted.)
I made a game with not only vector drawing, but vector movement! It's not quite where I would like it to be yet, but it needed to get out the door so I could continue refining.
Z to thrust
X to fire
Left/Right to turn a discrete amount in either direction (this is the only decent way I could find of doing it so far, arbitrary rotation ruins the shapes for some reason).
Try to shoot down as many enemies as you can before one hits you.
Put this together based on another project (https://github.com/PROGRAM-IX/vectorwars). No sprites used whatsoever, all content is generated procedurally and drawn every frame. I love this kind of game, but thought it might be a little heavy for PICO-8. Apparently not, at least in this small version. I'll probably play more with this for other more complex games.
ARROWS MOVE
Z FIRES
PROTECT YOUR HOME
Tried to get this together in a night for #p8jam2 ("chain reaction"), but didn't quite make it. Had a different idea originally, which I ended up putting way more time into before realising it didn't make much sense. Oh well, game jams am I right?
Blow things up, they will blow more things up. Try to shoot the right ones so that you end up taking as few shots as possible.
Arrows: Move
Z: Fire
Submitted to #LOWREZJAM: https://program_ix.itch.io/mslcom64
In MISSLCOM64, you control the missile defence system for a small town that's under attack. Move the cursor with the arrows and send bullets up to destroy the missiles with Z.
Made in about two and a half hours. Hinged on the realisation late the night before submission that I could hack my own sprite function to make PICO-8 effectively 64x64 (by stretching EVERY sprite*2). Unfortunately this meant to stay within the 64x64 grid, I had to do a lot of manual drawing of text and write a custom function to draw numbers based on sprites too. Still, I think it came out pretty well. If I'd come up with a way to do text without drawing it in the spritesheet, I would have had an easier time I think. (And given how quickly I did the numbers rendering function, it would have been well worth the time invested.) But it would've meant either custom sprite sizes for text, or having a lot less text onscreen. So whatever.
For those interested, the function to 'convert' PICO-8 to 64x64 is this:
FUNCTION SPR64(S,X,Y) SSPR((S%16)*8,(S/16)*8,8,8,X*2,Y*2,16,16) END |
If you replace all your SPR() calls with that, and keep your coordinates inside (64, 64), it should 'just work'. Problem is that now you have half as many sprites' worth of space. I didn't want to get into half-size sprites, but you definitely could change this function a little to get that if you are confident in how the sprite numbering works (since e.g., 4x4 sprites will mean you cannot rely on the numbers in the UI).
EDIT: You can also just do POKE(0x5F2C,3) to achieve the same effect without all the messing about. >.< Oh well. It was a fun hack.
Anyway, enjoy!
This game's really simple and pretty silly. A cowboy is assailed on all sides by tumbleweeds. Endless, rolling tumbleweeds. The cowboy must use their comically oversized bullets to destroy the tumbleweeds before they are overwhelmed.
Arrows move, Z fires.
In a shocking display of modesty, this game was inspired by my own tweet: https://twitter.com/PROGRAM_IX/status/706624643826847744
Like TRAIN, I started this game with the misguided idea that PICO-8 could do more things than it actually can. In this case, I was sure I'd read somewhere the console could allow text input if you did some weird mode thing. No idea where this idea came from.
In any case, I'd already written some of the room logic by the time I realised, so I figured a very basic exploration thing would be easier to play with just four directions and Z anyway.
Explore this weird building you're in, and try to find a way out. Arrows are North, East, South, West. Z is your action button although the only actions are starting or restarting the game.
Hope you enjoy! (Use this code and make your own adventure games!!!)
I'm very pleased to finally release TRAIN, a game I've been messing about with for months and months. It started out as an attempt to build a nice interface that would look right in a very old point-and-click simulation game, and grew a lot from that aesthetic. It's definitely one of the things I've made that I'm proudest of with PICO-8, as minimal as it seems.
You have a large control panel for a very small toy train. The controls are supposed to be something of a puzzle. There are no instructions, only hints, but suffice it to say that you can make the train move. Fuel is limited, so the goal is to maximise your distance. Ideally, you won't go hunting in the source to figure out what the buttons do, but the buttons used are these:
Left Shift
Z
X
S
D
F
UP
DOWN
You should see a definite effect from most button presses, so most of it will be fairly simple after an initial trial/error period.
It's a weird little game, but I hope you enjoy it.
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