Adam Atomic [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Dino Sort v1.1

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:41:40 UTC

Dino Sort v1.1

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

There are, uh, dinosaurs, and, well, you have to, you know, sort them out.

This one took me a while! I've never managed to make a whole game about dinosaurs before, which for a die-hard life-long dinosaur nut and chronic game maker is kind of absurd. But here we are and I'm really happy with this one. There's a set of authored puzzles, an infinite-mode that generates random puzzles, and a daily challenge so folks can hopefully have fun doing the same random puzzle each day. I had a really good time making the art for this one.

Dust Bunny

Mon, 05 May 2025 21:56:53 UTC

Dust Bunny

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

You're a small bunny with a big job - sweeping up the dust!

Controls are arrow keys to move, either button to reload the level.

Dust Bunny (PREVIEW)

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:55:32 UTC

Dust Bunny (PREVIEW)

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

This is a preview build of my upcoming puzzle game "Dust Bunny". It is intended to be used as a reference for other PICO8 folk in case they want to make games like this. The code base is very simple, and it only has 6 or 8 sprites total, but it still has a full 30 levels with fun twists and things.

Dust Bunny runs off my normal puzzle game conventions which are broken down and focused more in my other project "Soko Sample" https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=sokosample

LOADLEVEL() is something i started doing on MOLE MOLE after some of the PRINCE OF PRUSSIA setup was bugging me. Since i started out making overworld games like RAT DREAMS and SEBASTIANS QUEST, when i started making more single-screen puzzles, my thought was well, its still basically an overworld, we just move the camera around, etc. Voila. But I use tilemaps pretty destructively, which isn't great for reload heavy games like PRINCE OF PRUSSIA. I thought I was very clever by having POP literally reboot itself from scratch every time you die, and then auto-press the continue button basically. BUT IT TURNS OUT, you can just dump the title screen and copy each level into the first screen of the tilemap whenever you change levels. This makes level loading and moving to the next level all use the same block of code, and in order to find the player spawn tile and things like that, I was already having to mget() most of each level when they started anyways.

So anyways LOADLEVEL() basically copies-and-processes other screens into the first screen, which makes all the actual gameplay code very simple, and gives you lots of openings to modify the level data as it loads in. AND you can use the same block of code for lots of different game situations, like Continue From Title, Dying, Restarting, Move to Next Level, etc.

ANYWAYS

if you look at the code for MOLE MOLE you'll see a similar load level loop https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=148484 and pretty similar movement systems etc. ok thats it!!

I'll be posting the full version of Dust Bunny in a week or two!

Mole Mole

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:41:13 UTC

Mole Mole

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Both buttons do the same thing, which is place bombs if you've collected any. 25ish levels of hopefully fresh-ish puzzle goodness <3

Prince of Prussia

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:56:18 UTC

Prince of Prussia

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

prince of persia and castle wolfenstein - two great tastes that go great together imo!!

Bandit Accountancy

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 21:14:11 UTC

Bandit Accountancy

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

very silly game. d-pad only. try to stay in the floooowww

Cave of Cards

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 02:48:11 UTC

Cave of Cards

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

In Cave of Cards, you clear dungeons by making poker hands.

The X button opens the shop dimension, and the O button lets you crouch (preventing you from banging into things).

Find and unlock the exit door by clearing the dungeon.

High score is based on how many hearts you have left at the end.

Weasel

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:50:13 UTC

Weasel

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Silly snake game for our corporate mascot and valentine's day... press X or C to "boost", allowing you to eat the otherwise lethal chocolates.

Skeleton Gelatin

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 01:54:05 UTC

Skeleton Gelatin

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

possibly world's first blobtroidvania... no upgrades, no hp, no dying, no checkpoints, no jumping, no problem

i do not recommend trying an all-skulls run until you've finished a normal run at least once!

Soko Sample (Minified)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 19:16:45 UTC

sokomin

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Just my Soko Sample project, but minified to fit in a single bsky post.

Soko Sample

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 15:12:08 UTC

Soko Sample

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

A basic sokoban codebase. Maybe 25 lines of hopefully very easy to understand code. Most of the games I've been making over the last few months all run off this basic framework, and I wanted to have this out there in case it was helpful to anyone else! The "vibe" is based a lot off of things like Bitsy and Puzzlescript, but the simplicity of the code and fact that I've been able to make really fun and expressive games off this paradigm I think makes it really nice. Some games that use this as their base logic include:

Sebastian's Quest https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=146554
Vampire vs Pope Army https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=146644
Rat Dreams https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=145325

Anyways, please enjoy!

WHAT'S THE BASIC IDEA

All my games like this have a simple approach, which is to check what the player WANTS to do and then see if that's possible or not BEFORE doing it. The guts of my simple sokoban setup is just three steps:

INPUT() - First, see what direction the player wants to go
PUSH() - Second, check if there's anything to push out of the way
MOVE() - Third, check if we are clear to move to an open space or not.

This is a pretty powerful approach and can be expanded or extended to use bigger rectangles, mixed shapes like tetris shapes, or even matching chunks of tilemap against other chunks of tilemap (my game DUST SETTLERS does this).

When I'm doing Bitsy or Puzzlescript style games, I tend to store the player position as a tile coordinate, not a real coordinate, since it drastically simplifies steps two and three from above. When I draw the player sprite, I multiply the X and Y values by 8 to put it in the right spot on the screen.

This approach is also very deliberately based on taking as much advantage of the PICO8 tilemap as I can, usually from the start of every prototype. It's such an awesome way to manage game logic and interactions. Plus it's fun to plop little colored squares all over and see what happens...

ABOVE AND BEYOND

Fun things to add or expand on from this base might include interactions like what happens if you push an egg into another egg? what happens if you push an egg into a wall? can the bird lay more eggs? Or you could add animations to the bird by drawing more sprites and changing when they appear. You could extend the map and have the camera follow the bird around on their adventure. You could change the eggs to be waffles. You could add holes to push the eggs into. You could give the bird a "fly" mode where instead of pushing eggs they can eat bugs or something. You could have the eggs hatch every 20 steps and now you control more birds. Every time the bird moves it could leave a new obstacle behind it.

THE TEMPTATION WAS TOO GREAT

I wrote a version of this logic that fits into 256 characters... this is not good as an introductory or exploratory exercise, however, it was fun, and doing fun things is what pico8 is all about !! https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=161737#p

Vampire vs Pope Army

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 03:49:19 UTC

vampire_vs_pope_army

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Sebastian's Quest

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 06:01:34 UTC

sebastiansquest

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

kept this one under 500 lines of code, i think that's a new record for me

get that cheese 🧀

derbis

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:11:09 UTC

derbis

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Bucket list: make a missile command fan-game... another "bach" style game where you're kind of doing two things at once. Indulgent haha

Dust Settlers

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:19:30 UTC

Dust Settlers

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

Self-indulgent game for me, very fun that other folks are enjoying it too. I really wanted to make something like Blocksum, where you were on the clock to make a kind of... big blob of high scoring stuff? I guess. THat's a game. Seeing Tetrachroma helped me figure out some stuff too. Ok!

Kuiper Cargo

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:17:08 UTC

Kuiper Cargo

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

I couldn't even get done with Rat Dreams before I started doodling stuff that turned into Kuiper Cargo... went through a few iterations before settling on this kind of level limit / upgrades approach. Really happy with pretty much everything tbh. Ok!

Rat Dreams

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:15:21 UTC

ratdrms

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

A halloween game for Kyle and Andrew <3

tweetjam

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:20:00 UTC

better rainbow etchasketch

by Adam Atomic

[Click to Play]

better etchasketch! ~118 characters (110 w/o clear-screen or random color)

cls()
x=0 y=0
while 1 do
if(btn(0)) x-=1
if(btn(1)) x+=1
if(btn(2)) y-=1
if(btn(3)) y+=1
pset(x,y,7+rnd(9))
flip()
end