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!
Good simple concept that has lots of potential! It's satisfying to clear all the dust. With the quality of mole mole the finished game will be great!
It is very puezlescripty, it’s super common in puzzle script to mess pushing rules and have unwanted sticky tiles as a result. If for once you want things to stick, it’s dealt with a single rule :
[moving movable|stationary movable]->[moving movable|moving movable]
The level extraction was also super easy : I just changed the tile number to character correspondance array, and ran unchanged the pico8 function I had already written for mole mole.
As a result, every level is 16x16, I could have removed the surrounding black by hand.
Because there was very few tiles, I redid them in the 5x5 vanillia puzzlescript resolution.
Oh, I also added a skip level when pressing x to quickly test every feature,and forgot to remove it.
A rough PS preview from your preview ;)
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