Blasteroids

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 19:00:36 UTC

Blasteroids

by Senorbaub

[Click to Play]

Controls:

Left arrow and right arrow to turn the ship canon
Up arrow to accelerate the ship forward
X or O to fire the ship canon
When X or O are held down the canon will autofire; however, the canon will rotate faster when not firing
Drifting of the ship can be toggled on and off in the Pause Menu

Rules:

In Blasteroids you control a space ship with the objective of shooting asteroids into smaller chunks until nuggets of Zytonium ore are revealed and can be harvested. To harvest ore you must move your ship over it and it will be collected. After enough chunks of ore have been harvested you will move on to the next objective.

Maneuvering your ship through the asteroid field is very dangerous; however, you are equipped with a shield that will break apart an asteroid if it gets too close. Once this happens the shield needs time to recharge and you are vulnerable to asteroid collisions and can take damage. If your ship takes too much damage then it is destroyed and you must restart your objective.

Hostile drones will also appear and shoot at you. They are sturdy enemies and will take a number of shots to destroy with your canon, but most will leave the area shortly after firing at your ship.

Behind The Scenes:

Blasteroids is my attempt to create an Asteroids clone which I had heard is common for new game developers to do. Due to the rotation of the ship as well as the ship and asteroids moving at any angle it wasn't obvious at first how this would be accomplished in Pico-8 but after mulling it over for some time and brushing up on some Trigonometry and I figured out how to create the basic movement that would drive the entire game.

For simplicity and stylishness I decided to use mostly circle based elements with some sprite work to add more detail. This made collision detection a matter of calculating the distance between center points and determining if that meant two elements were overlapping. It was a little ways into development that I decided to give the color scheme a more neon look.

After getting the basic gameplay loop of Asteroids working I wanted to add something more to make it my own so I worked on adding different shot types to both your ship and to the drones. The Oscillating shot and the Rebound shot were the most challenging and took some time to figure out the trigonometry to make these work. There were also multiple cases to check for depending on the angle at which a shot was made.

Finally there was the challenge of figuring out how to end the game as I wanted it to end on a high note. It's pretty standard in a lot of games but it took me a while to decide to go with a boss fight. This decision was largely inspired by watching the shmup tutorial by Lazy Devs Academy (along with a bunch of other elements) but I didn't want to just throw in some random random enemy that didn't tie with the rest of the game. At some point it dawned on me to just use the drones I had already been using but instead attack in a group and in a different movement pattern than is seen previously in the game.

Credits:

Blasteroids was developed by myself with a lot of inspiration by Lazy Devs Academy.

I can be reached on Twitter at senorbaub

Version 1.2 Release Notes:

Added a toggle in the Pause Menu to turn on/turn off the drifting of the space ship

Cavern Run

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 21:41:58 UTC

Cavern Run 1.2

by Senorbaub

[Click to Play]

About

Cavern Run is an infinite running game where the player runs through a dark cavern to collect diamonds while avoiding the various dangers of the cavern.

Controls

Accelerate - Right arrow
Brake - Left arrow
Jump - Z on keyboard/A on controller
Jump Forward - Jump while holding the Right arrow
Jump Backward - Jump while holding the Left arrow

Thank you to:

@Krystman for the tutorials on coding and game design
@Gruber for the tutorials on composing music in Pico-8

Ice Cream Slinger

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:21:31 UTC

Ice Cream Slinger

by Senorbaub

[Click to Play]

A short game about serving ice cream using a catapult-ish mechanic.

My first project that's somewhat complete. It's pretty bare bones at this point but pretty playable.

The list of tweaks and improvements I plan to make include:

-add sound FX and music

-make art and a logo for the title screen

-make background art for the game play. I'm thinking make it appear that you are standing over buckets of
ice cream

-randomize which ice cream scoops are queued up

-streamline a bunch of the code. I need to tweak how the arrays used for tallying numbers at the end are
structured so that I can just use loops to populate them and do the comparisons

-add bonuses. Thinking a full ice cream order gets a completion bonus. Also, maybe a penalty for any
customers that didn't get any ice cream

-add actual levels. I had the idea that obstacles of some kind randomly float across the middle of the
screen that can block ice cream scoops after they are flung

Senorbaub [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]