mrh [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Token Count with #include files

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 21:03:36 UTC

Is there a good way to see the total token count of a cartridge that is #including code from external files?

I know you can save the cart as .p8.png to get the includes flattened and then see the token count, but that's kind of a painful workflow when you're optimising code for token count.

If not @zep can you add a way to do this? Maybe a new mode for the stat tracker in the code editor?

What does the Ctrl+P widget actually show?

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 21:41:52 UTC

Apologies, this has probably been answered before but it's kind of hard to search for this feature. It's not well documented in the readme or the wiki that I can find...

What does the CTRL+P performance monitor/CPU usage widget actually show? What do all the lines/dots and numbers represent?

Planet Grid

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 23:10:54 UTC

Planet Grid v1.1

by mrh

[Click to Play]

Welcome to Planet Grid. This is a small puzzle game, loosely based on the board game Barenpark. Instructions in game. Enjoy! Please feel free to leave any constructive criticism.

Controls: Arrow keys: select/move piece, Button O: Confirm, Button X: Rotate piece

Edit: Released v1.1 with a few small improvements and bug fixes.

Super Cake Cutter

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 20:38:11 UTC

Super Cake Cutter

cakecut

by mrh

[Click to Play]

Super Cake Cutter is a weird game I made, inspired by a weekly struggle suffered by my D&D group. Divide the cake evenly into the required number of slices. Watch out for strawberries, they make a slice more valuable!

Controls:
Arrows/D-Pad: Move current cut point
Button 1/Z: Cut
Button 2/X: Swap current cut point

Music Credit:
Autumn Wind by gruber (cc4-by-nc-sa) from the Pico-8 Tunes Vol. 2

Enjoy!

Picoception - A game engine for Pico-8 made in Pico-8

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 17:35:46 UTC

Picoception 1.1

by mrh

[Click to Play]

This cart is a game engine for the Pico-8. It's heavily based on flickgame, of course rewritten from scratch for the P8. Basically, you draw frames, and script the transitions between frames when a certain colour is clicked.

Controls
Mouse strongly recommended: Left click to interact/click buttons, right mouse to erase and exit play mode
Dpad and buttons can be used to replace mouse if you really want

Features

8 64x64 px, 16 colour frames
Save to cart and autoplay to make standalone cartridges
Save/load to clipboard for handy sharing
Crappy editor UI

I might write up some more stuff about the technical side later. The actual code sucks, don't look at it. :)

Here's an example cart (remember you can right mouse/button 2 to exit play mode and view the source):

Picoception P8 Demo 1.1

by mrh

[Click to Play]

If anyone makes anything cool please feel free to share here, as a cart or a clipboard save.

Bug/Shenanigans with Code Tabs

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 14:31:33 UTC

I don't know whether this qualifies as a "bug" per se, or just "don't do silly things", but here goes.

If you open up a cart with Code Tabs in an editor you can see they are just separated by a character sequence: "-->8".

Weird stuff happens if you manually insert these. If you insert them in the P8 editor, they'll just sit there until you next load the cart, at which point they will become new tabs.

Also the P8 editor enforces a maximum 8 tabs (labelled 0-7). If you have more than this, it will silently drop the offending extra tabs, even if they have content.

My suggestion would be to do something different - perhaps ignore extra tab separators and concatenate all the extra tabs into one? Or at least flag a warning on load.

The way I can see this being a real problem is with copy and pasting via external editor. It would be really nasty to accidentally drop part of your code this way.

Pathtris - An arcade puzzle game

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 17:54:32 UTC

Pathtris - An arcade puzzle game 0.1

by mrh

[Click to Play]

Here's my latest creation. The goal is to score points by making closed paths. You lose a life when you try and place a tile where it won't fit with the existing tiles on the board. There's a timer which forces you to place if you haven't when it runs out. Bonus points if you make a closed loop with none of the end cap pieces.

Controls: Arrow to move the cursor, button 1 to place a tile and button 2 to hold.

Let me know what you think. :)

It's the 2017 Lowrezjam! Progress pics/discussion

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:45:47 UTC

I thought people might be interested. https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam2017

It started a few days ago but it's running until the 17th so you haven't lost too much time yet. Lowrezjam games are 64x64 but you can get this in Pico-8 by doing a poke(0x5f2c,3).

I'm working on a pirate sailing adventure. I've got sailing around working ok, working on disembarking so you can walk around islands to look for treasure. Here's my progress so far:

Anyone else want to share?

REACTOR-8

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 16:35:31 UTC

REACTOR-8 0.1

by mrh

[Click to Play]

A chain reaction type game where you attempt to destroy nearly all the particles in the level.

Controls: Arrows to move, z to explode.

This is a demo, playable and (IMO) fun but it needs some polishing, most notably in the difficulty/progression. Adding more features to vary the levels would probably be a good idea.

Known bugs: Levels from about 8+ are not great, level 11+ is broken...

3D Rendering in 11 lines of LUA

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:46:01 UTC

32 Rendering in 11 lines of LUA

by mrh

[Click to Play]

I'm thinking about making a vector graphics 3d game for the PICO-8 so I coded up a little demo. The 11 lines refers to the _DRAW() function for the pedants out there. :)

This is probably terrible in some way as I don't know much about 3d rendering, I just worked out the equations from a little background knowledge and some trig. Seems to work ok as long as you don't pass through the viewing plane (possibly the wrong term for what I'm thinking of).

Maze Algorithms on the Pico-8

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 15:39:57 UTC

Maze Algorithms on the Pico-8

by mrh

[Click to Play]

A fun little toy/demo displaying some maze algorithms.

Note the mazes generated are perfect mazes, meaning they have exactly one path from any point to any other point inside the maze. They're not so useful for making games without some adaptation.

Algorithms:

Binary tree: at each cell, decides to go either down or right. Produces a bias towards diagonal movement and obvious lines at the bottom/right.

Sidewinder: goes along a run of cells horizontally, then adds one passage downwards. Tends towards vertical movement and obvious line at the bottom.

Aldous-Broder: random walk filling in cells as they're visited. Produces a totally unbiased maze (assuming rnd() is unbiased) but can be slow at the end.

If you're interested in the topic I recommend this book (that I got the idea/algorithms from): Mazes for Programmers.

Slam Jam Picolution

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 17:14:49 UTC

Slam Jam Revolution 0.3

by mrh

[Click to Play]

A rhythm game for the Pico-8.

Controls: Press arrows with timing for great justice.

Music Credit: Wistful Waltz by 0xbad1dea, see this thread (big thanks).

UPDATED 0.3: Silly title screen, particle effects, persistent high scores. Still only one song, more coming soon(TM).

I'm no musician, so if anyone would like to submit a song for the Pico-8 for the full version I'd much appreciate it (with full credits included of course).

P.S. My high score is 7660, apparently that's pretty good?

Pico-Chess!

Sat, 03 Oct 2015 14:40:22 UTC

Pico-Chess! 0.95

by mrh

[Click to Play]

Pico-Chess! 0.9

by mrh

[Click to Play]

2 player chess. Arrows to move, button 1 to select a piece and confirm a move, button 2 to deselect.

En passant, castling, and pawn promotion don't work. Because they're complicated. I'm going to try and make an improved version soon which will have these rules working properly. This is why it's v0.95.

If you're going to look at the code, be warned: here be dragons. Its messy. Also white and black are swapped in the code from what they actually are in the game. Don't ask.