kozm0naut [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Untitled Summoning Project

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 05:18:11 UTC

Ludum Dare 55 was last weekend and the theme was "Summoning." I didn't really plan to compete in the jam but I thought I would try my hand at making something to fit an external idea.

This is still not a game (I didn't stand a chance of getting anything done in 72hrs) but I thought I'd share what I have so far.

There are no enemies yet. Use the arrow keys to move, X to pick a summon and O to summon it for its cost. That's all there is.

koz_untitledsummoninggame

by kozm0naut

[Click to Play]

I'm not sure how much farther I will continue with it. The game would probably be a survivors-type crossed with diablo-summoner-esque gameplay in which your summons do all the fighting for you, with a little bit borrowed from tower defense. Also, bouncing.

Credit goes to 2darray for aacirc() from Marble Merger

Let me know what you think!

Bouncy Ball

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:45:38 UTC

Bouncy Ball

bouncyball

by kozm0naut

[Click to Play]

"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall."

- Mitch Hedberg

Game Guide

It takes a steady paddle...

The paddle imparts its speed on the ball, so keep it steady or use this to your advantage to control the ball.. if you can keep up with it!

Modifiers

Modifiers will refresh along the back wall every 5 bounces. Some will give you an advantage, others a disadvantage. Be careful what you land on!

Paddle Size

[7x7]

[7x7]
Paddle Speed

[7x7]

[7x7]
Ball Speed

[7x7]

[7x7]
Gravity Wells

[7x7]

[7x7]

[7x7]

[7x7]
???

[7x7]
?????

[7x7]

[7x7]

[7x7]

...??

Demo Mode

Bouncy Ball includes a self-playing demo mode. Unlock up to 4 CPU demo skill levels by playing!

Thanks to the PICO-8 community!

Big heartfelt thanks to @zep for making this wonderfully fun tool!
Credit for nice smooth circles goes to @2darray: aacirc() is used from Marble Merger.
Thanks to everyone on the BBS and Discord for harboring such an amazing community!

This is my first PICO-8 game release, and my second complete game release overall. I tried desperately to keep it as simple as possible in order to actually bring it to completion. As such, the game is only 4 colors!...

...However, there may or may not be additional palettes included as hidden unlockables within the game...

Suggest a suitable (reasonable contrast) 4-color palette in the comments and I may just include it as a rare unlockable option, along with your name!

Have fun and post your high scores!

BBS Superblog: all players play last cart

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 14:45:56 UTC

It appears that at the moment, playing any web player in the Superblog only plays the most recent cart run on the page since loading (whether PICO-8 or Picotron, regardless of player)

This will eventually error out for Picotron webplayers attempting to load PICO-8 games.

How to fully erase/reset cartdata?

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 06:40:34 UTC

Hi all, just getting started with saving player data.

cartdata() returns true or false depending on if there was existing cartdata or if it was just created. I am testing initialization of some default cartdata in the case that it returns false but I am having trouble testing this more than once per cartdata ID / per cart. I have tried wiping out 0x5e00-0x5eff with memset(0x5e00,0,0xff) but it doesn't seem to reset the boolean representing the presence of existing cartdata (unless I'm doing this wrong). Does anyone know if there is a way to fully delete/reset cartdata for a given cart/cart ID?

Thanks!

One-line minimap

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:38:00 UTC

This is pretty simple but I thought some devs might find it useful as an easy way to add a minimap to your game. It uses tline to draw a miniature version of the full map area to screen (during your _draw loop):

for i=0,64 do tline(0,32+i,128,32+i,4/8,4/8+i,1) end

The representative pixel is drawn from the center (4/8,4/8) of each sprite, but you can alter this if you want a different selection.

Here's an example of what this looks like in Celeste:

And here's Air Delivery with this line added:

Obviously it can be a bit messy raw, but it's accurate. For your own project, you could put this against a solid background color in your pause menu, for example. And then you might add an indicator for player position ;)

I hope this can be useful out there!

Tweetcart: Shimmerscale

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 19:12:11 UTC

Shimmerscale

NOW IN GLORIOUS QUADRACOLOR

Consuming 239 chars because I didn't bother to minify further:

cls(13)s=sin
a=12b=4
::_::
t=time()/4
for i=0,36 do 
for j=0,42 do
r=(i+1.4*j)/64
m=12*s(t+r)
x=-8+4*i+3.4*s(t+r-.25)
y=-20+4*j+8*s(r)
if(btn(❎))a=11b=5
if(btn(🅾️))a=12b=4
o=a+(i/3+j/3+t*16)%b
line(x,y-m,x+1,y-m+s(t+r+.75),o)
end
end
goto _

Press ❎ to activate CHROMATOSIS:
An experimental bleeding-edge 5-color mode

Feel free to use/modify this effect for your projects!

a is the starting color and b is how many subsequent colors in the palette to use, so you can alter this to use any colors you want using pal({}) and those two variables. Note that the effect relies on not using cls() so this would be best suited to a splash screen or menu, or for use with clip()

*angle also slightly modified for this example

Tweetcart: Fire Dance

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 16:39:10 UTC

I've been working on a little tweetcart so that I might have something to actually release while still at work on more ambitious projects.

I was able to get it down to 272 chars. It runs at 60fps.

Edit: Used up the last few characters fixing a bug, refining the decay and adding some slight interactivity. Some chars can probably be reclaimed by combining the loops somehow (and using goto instead) but I'll probably just leave it at this.

It starts slow and continues building over time. Enjoy!

tc_firedance

by kozm0naut

[Click to Play]

BBS issue: mentions not working

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 17:55:39 UTC

Hi, I apologize that this is in the PICO-8 bugs category, but I don't see one for BBS bugs. For the last few days it would seem some (not all) @ mentions (e.g. @kozm0naut) have not turned to links as normal, and I'm not sure users are getting the usual notifications that they've been mentioned.

Here are some recent posts in which @ mentions did not seem to work for me despite having the correct username:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=139543#p
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=139504#p

Thanks for reading, and happy new year!

Q: Locality of for/in

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:54:29 UTC

Hello all, I'm still learning about PICO-8 and I'm interested in ensuring I understand the implications of using local variables, global variables or upvalues.

As many do, I use a for/in loop to update my roster of enemies:

 for en in all(ens) do
  local ecx,ecy,efov=en.x+2,en.y+3,0.1
  --apply friction
  en.dx*=(en.dx>0.05 or en.dx<-0.05) and fric or 0
  en.dy*=(en.dy>0.05 or en.dy<-0.05) and fric or 0

  if (en.alert>0) efov=0.3

  --sees player?
  if (sees(ecx,ecy,pcx,pcy,50,en.fac,efov,2)) then
   --face toward player
   en.fac=atan2(pcx-ecx,pcy-ecy)
   --set terminus
   en.tx,en.ty=pcx,pcy
   en.alert=2
  -- ...etc

My question is regarding the locality of the current element ("en" in the example above) and its constituent table elements. If I'm going to be reading en.x, en.dx, etc. multiple times within the loop, will it save cycles to make local copies of each of these first, or are they already local by being part of the current element ("en")?

Thanks!

SpriteEdit: Paste/Undo doesn't undo flags

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 20:21:16 UTC

In the PICO-8 sprite editor, copying and pasting a sprite will copy the sprite's contents and flags, but using undo from this point will reverse the pasting of the sprite content but not the flags, leaving the flags set.

Not a huge deal, but I thought I would point it out. Thanks!