Got to thinking about Populous today; played the hell out of the game on my Amiga 500 when I was a kid.
This is a first crack at a terrain manipulation demo in that style. There's no game here yet, just a small map you can terraform and a little dude running around willy nilly on it and seeming rather distressed when he's in the water. I may try and build a little game out of it, though just sort of working out how to handle the isometric sprites in a basic way has been the rewarding bit I was aiming for.
A neat discovery in all this was that I could get all of the terrain drawn using 7 distinct sprite shapes, thanks to careful use of horizontal and vertical flipping and palette swaps (and if I wanted to trade a little more code I could get rid of one of those by compositing two others). Was a little bit of a note-taking headache to make that work, but really satisfying once I got it.
Right now the map is just fixed in size (I threw in a little camera movement to follow the cursor around), but an obvious next step tech-wise would be to dynamically scroll through a larger map only showing a chunk of it in the viewport.
Hat tip to YellowAfterlife for their slick isometric demo last week, which put me on to the idea of giving this a shot.
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a tiny game about gardening
Catch the falling plants and plant them to make a garden.
v1.1 - Hopefully more "delightful" and less "stressful" :)
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Take on the role of humanitarian rebel Jehanne Butler in an all-out war against the intelligent machines that seek to mold and ennslave their organic creators! Armed only with a slow-charging Holtzman shield/displacement belt, use your wits to pit the robots against one another and defeat the machine-mind scourge!
Controls:
- arrows + z to move to an adjacent tile
- z to wait (and activate shield if in danger)
- x to displace to a random tile on the board
Instructions:
- Clear each board of robots by tricking them into colliding with one another or with the remains of already-destroyed machines.
- Watch your shield power! It's invaluable but scarce, and an emergency shield after teleporting will drain power more quickly than using it when standing still.
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Enjoy the sports game of hockey!
2 Player action!
Control your own goalie!
Wonky physics!
All your friends will want it!
Controls:
Player1: arrow keys, n to shoot
Player2: esdf, left shift to shoot
joysticks would probably be a lot better.
It's definitely still a work in progress.
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So a thing I distinctly remember from back in the day was games coming on multiple CDs. Usually adventure games, and the like.
Now, is this possible with Pico-8? My assumption was being able to have a "huge" map by splitting the areas on different carts, and having a "load screen" that asks you to change the cart.
I know it's possible to load other carts from within a cart and other funky stuff, but that's a liiittle different. I'd like it to feel a bit more physical than that, hence asking the player to load the next cartridge.
The problem therein, though, is that base ram is copied from cart rom whenever the editor is closed. Does that include the prompt? I'd love to try to test this out, but...uh, I really have no idea where to start.
Also, this'll probably be a neater trick to pull when the persistent save data is out.
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Build burgers on your plate. Catch the ingredients as they come down.
Extra score for bottom and top buns at correct locations. Less score for double of any ingredient. Extra score for bacon. Game ends after 6 plates.
left/right: move plate
up/z: finish plate early
z: restart after game over
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This is my first cartridge, and basically my first game. It's based off some really old cribbage AI that I wrote years ago. Ported it over to pico-8 for fun.
It's a bit rushed and some of the logic is sloppy. Still missing a few rules and needs some cleanup on some of the timing but the core is there at least.
My goal was to try and make some AI that was difficult to beat.
I'm a web application developer by day.
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Can anyone suggest some resources for a rank newcomer to game coding? I've got enough understanding from playing with c++ in college to understand most of the syntax when I read Pico-8 carts, but it's tough for me to understand what's going in in the more complex parts of the carts. Even jelpi is over my head.
I was hoping I'd learn how to do some basic game mechanics like collision detection, but I'm just going in circles here!
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I get how the tracker works, but I don't find it easy to work with at all. A simple piano roll alternate setup would be nice. Kind of like the difference between the graph editor and the tracker in the SFX.
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This is my first PICO-8 cart and my first game project in many years.
Honestly I am pretty happy with this lil thing :)
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A simple Marble Madness clone with three levels.
Move with the arrow keys, jump with Z and pause with X.
Hope you enjoy it :)
Some things I might add:
- More levels
- More special tiles
- Traditional isometric controls as an option (eg right arrow = move down-right)
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Super simple example cart I made for the PICO-8 ZINE by arnaud_debock. Press Z to make the train start moving, and Z again to make it stop.
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Can be combined with global palette to create objects that can only be seen in close promixity.
Somewhat bearable performance-wise.
Haxe source: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c885964ca61431a8e90a
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Maybe Pico-8's first surfing game. This is still work in progress.
Controls:
up / down
Lyrics:
Collect water melons
To play the music
Up and down to dodge blocks
Surf as long as possible
Updates:
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I was thinking, what if there was an underpowered handheld spinoff console from the makers of the PICO 8? Sure, it's not as beefy as the original console, but oh the portability!
So this is a really rough prototype: I've built up the PICO JR console as the core game loop of the cartridge, processing input into thumb movement and some really sketchily modeled instinctive controller swerving, with the bulk of the code stuck down below and the actual code for the little in-game game up top in the cart.
My gut take on the specs for this:
- 48*48 pixel four-tone greyscale graphics (so, colors 0, 5, 6, and 7 in the PICO 8 palette)
- 2 channel sound
- dpad and one button (other button could be reserved for meta-game/menu stuff)
- 1 page of sprite sheet
- standard sprite size of 6x6 pixels
- dodgy slow-refresh LCD screen (could simulate this by checking screen buffer every frame and only allowing pixels to move one shade of grey toward whatever the target is)
Right now the tiny little Jump Guy game is just implemented for the screen and palette and sound limitations by me keeping myself honest, but I think the right way to go to do this right would be to write wrapper functions for all the standard PICO 8 calls that do appropriate constraining and sanity checks on the PICO JR specs. (So e.g. pj_sfx() and pj_music() would only accept as valid channels 0 and 1, spr() would only read off the allowed sprite page and would count by 6*6 blocks, etc.)
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You are standing outside a yellow castle. It is a fine summer day.
This is a PICO-8 homage to Atari 2600 Adventure. It's not just a nostalgia trip; I tried to make it a fun game in its own right.
Hints & History:
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Because every console needs a (few) Pong port(s).
This is my first Pico-8 project. I've got a lot more ideas for it, and it's not done yet.
Future Plans
- Powerups if a match goes on long enough? Honestly, not sure if this needs it.
- Music
Known Issues
- The AI is occasionally too good at the game.
- Sometimes the ball goes too fast to catch.
Changelog
v4
- Goal sound.
- AI tweaks.
- Ball speedup changes.
v3 - Made the court pretty
- Added a score display
- Made the AI a little easier by making the ball go faster over time.
v2 - Updated the splash screen.
v1
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UPDATE 2017-05-16:
VEKTOR2089 is now up for early access on itch.io!
Features:
- Split screen multiplayer
- Trackmania style hotseat multiplayer
- Track editor
- 60 fps
- Multiple cars to choose from with different feels and styles
- 4 speed classes
- Maybe a story mode, we'll see!
New in 1.5.0beta:
- 8 set looping tracks, 3 laps each
- Level editor (needs some more work)
Missing some stuff from the previous version that still needs to be fixed up:
- Boosters
- Narrowing tracks
- Time attack replays
Wipeout inspired racing game!
Z to ACCEL
X to BRAKE
UP to BOOST
LEFT and RIGHT to STEER
Q for MENU
Update 1.2.0:
- Reduced token usage
- Multiple difficulty levels (Easy, Medium, Hard (original difficulty))
Update 1.1.0:
- Somewhat easier AI, might actually be possible to beat them now
- Sharper turning circle
- Nerfed boosting a bit
- Boosted normal acceleration
- Reduced ship size slightly
- Warnings about upcoming turns and narrowing
- Performance improvements
Challenge your ghost or AI racers.
now with music + sound!
5 difficulty levels
in game menu
parallax scrolling foreground
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A PICO-8 conversion of my first game.
Controls:
| Up | Left | Down | Right | X / M | Y / N |
| Jump | Stop | Slide | Move Right | Restart | Debug |
It's unfinished, with level 2 just going on forever. The title text animation is blatantly stolen from the Hello World demo cart and fiddled with until it looked different enough to not just be a carbon copy.
This game is different from my usual projects in that I try to teach myself to take time and not rush things, not expect anything from the things I do and not try to make the game sound like any more than it is and post it all over the place. Basically, I want to become a game dev Buddhist, is what I'm saying.
If you wanna download the cart to look at the code yourself, feel free to. I tried to keep all the code as succinct as possible and commented it in an understandable way.
There's a bug where sometimes you can't jump anymore and have to reboot.
I'll keep working on this.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!Due to the limitations of PICO-8's web player, this cartridge can only be run from the console!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, at the risk of incurring Zep's wrath, I've thrown together some examples of how to use the console's RAM to get around filesize limits.
This cart will draw some sprites to the screen that are loaded from spritesheet.p8 (Just save a cart with some sprites in the folder with this cart). Feel free to steal / repurpose
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