Hey guys, this is sort of my first attempt to really make something with PICO-8 from scratch. Before making this, my only other PICO-8 experience was I followed the Squash tutorial from the PICO-8 zine and a bit of that tron light cycle tutorial on YouTube a few months ago and worked a little bit on a kind of turn based pong/space invaders kind of thing for a little bit but I didn't really make too much progress with that xD.

I was participating in Ludum Dare for the first time and PICO-8 was the only game making tool I knew how to use, so I tried making a game over the last weekend. The theme was making a game with two incompatible genres. I wanted to try and make a pinball/platformer game. The idea being you could charge yourself up at any time and fling yourself in a direction like a pinball at any given time and bounce off the walls to navigate gaps or climb upwards etc.

I got the charge and bouncing working on just a blank screen against the walls of the screen but then I started working on the platforming aspect. Unfortunately, I wound up spending pretty much the entire weekend trying to figure out how to make collisions work so the player could stand on platforms and not go through walls. I tried coming up with a bunch of different methods for it and I was finally starting to get some real headway by the end of it but then I was out of time.

You can see in the game that I have collision boxes drawn over every tile with a 1 flag(for collideable walls and platforms that should block the player) and collision boxes drawn over the player to help diagnose what was actually happening. The numbers are some debug data I was using previously. At this point the great difficulty was getting the player to be able to collide with the floor and walls at the same time. If I tried having code implemented for both, the player would fall inside of the tile floor tile, and then immediately get flung off the screen to the left, as it would push the player to the left side of the floor tile and into another floor tile.

The morning after I actually managed to solve that problem and actually have floors and walls working, although it's still a little janky. Unfortunately though, I never actually got far enough along to really make a game before the jam was over. Still, I put so much work into getting these fundamental parts together, I feel like I have to actually make something with it now that the jam is over, so I'm going to keep working on it. I'm mostly just uploading it here to see if this will let me have a playable version in browser that I could post in a blog post for the Ludum Dare site xD.

Also, in this version the player actually appears two pixels over the floor upon contact rather than just stopping and staying still where he collides with the floor. That's what causes the little hopping effect. It wasn't how I originally intended it but given this is just a "tech demo" I decided to leave it in, because frankly it just made the dude lot more fun to move around the screen ^_^. Go little hop dude, go!

This is really my first attempt to actually make a thing with programming. I've read through some of a java book, did javascript tutorials and had a C++ class and Java class in high school, but I always felt like my education always dropped just short of the point where I could actually make something with it. That's been one of the real joys of PICO-8 for me. Lua was simple enough to pick up and for the first time it felt like I could actually really write code and make a thing rather than just push values around and not even know how to get them appear on the screen outside of the console.

Hope you like my little thing. Now after thinking about it a bit, I might post what little I had of The Legend of Pong too down the road :)

platformer

Hi, I'm interested in adding a fullscreen title page to my game if possible, but since my spritesheet is full of sprites used in the game, I obviously can't fill that space with a big 128x128 image!

My current idea is to convert the cover art into ints and store it in a hardcoded array, and while on the title screen it renders the image manually pixel by pixel, but some quick maths showed me I'd probably be using over 1000 symbols for this! No good!

If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.

Also, in the case that it's not really feasible, is there a way to at least set the cartridge's art to be an image not stored on the rom to save a bunch of space? I'd rather have the cute title screen, but if it's not possible it's not possible.

Hi all,

I have recently started making a 2bit game that involves a lot of black outlining, and its dawned on me that in the sprite editor, anything coloured black isn't drawn and counts as an empty pixel..

Is there a way to change which colour counts as the "nothing" colour? Or alternatively, is there a way to underlay a sprite with a black silhouette etc.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Josh

Hi pico8'ers, it's me again. Sorry!

Today I am wondering what the best approach would be to check if a sprite/object has touched a line and act accordingly.

Take the following example:
Let's say I made this 45 degree slope and I have a character that can walk to it or jump to it from wherever. I want that line to be "solid" and affect the character's behavior.

Illustrated:

How would I go at this, I have no idea.
I have a collision system in place in my game, but it checks bounding boxes.
Of course I don't want to make bounding boxes of 1x1 and check against all of them, that sounds slow and stupid.

I think maybe what I need here is "raycasting" but I never in my life have done anything like that and have no idea where to begin. I don't even know if that is what I am looking for.

I don't want to make slopes of varying angles, it will always be a 45 degree slope. I Am hoping this also would make things easier.

I didn't find any cart on the BBS that does exactly what I want from where I could look at some code. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Any help appreciated!

ld41

z to shoot
arrows to move
shoot space bugs
dodge asteroids
shoot correct trivia answers to slay boss
shoot the wrong answer and pay the price

#ludumdare #ludumdare41

In 0.1.11g, if you're running a cart and hit the ESC key, then type "resume" in the command line, the game starts running from where it left off but with some issues.

In particular:

• The ENTER key no longer activates the in-game menu to reset and select custom options
• Music that was playing when the cart was paused does not start playing again

My submission to the Ludum Dare 41 Compo, my first Ludum Dare! I've been playing with PICO-8 on a different as-yet-unreleased project, but decided to jump in on a game from scratch for LD. The theme was "combine two incompatible genres", and I went with a side-scrolling text adventure. It's playable, if a bit spartan - I started Saturday morning, so everything you see here is the product of something like 28 hours of coding/eating and 5 hours of sleep. I'm pretty proud of what I made of it, all things considered!

The inspiration for the game was a picture of an old Apple Newton that someone posted in Slack at work, which had a frog icon for a game that I initially thought was titled "Frogs vs. Cats". Upon zooming in and consulting references of Apple Newton apps, I was disappointed to find that it was in fact Frogs vs. [i]Cars

[ Continue Reading.. ]

frogs cats ludumdare ldjam ld41 textadventure sidescrolling

You are at a speedrun event. You're trying to complete an RPG as quickly as possible, skipping as much as you can.

Made solo from scratch in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 41 based on the theme 'Combine 2 Incompatible Genres'.

​Ludum Dare entry page

​Tweet thread

itch.io page

Timelapse:

ldjam ld41 rpg speedrun

Hey folks! Been awhile since I've posted something on the BBS, but thought I'd share my LD41 entry.
It's local multiplayer only unfortunately (I'd hoped to get a decent AI opponent in but didn't have time). If you manage to get someone to play with you though, let me know how it goes!

HOW TO PLAY

• drop pieces in empty slots
• swap pieces in filled slots
• match 3+ to earn swaps
• connect exactly 4 to win

LD entry page
itch.io page

ldjam ld41

Fixed the various boss fight glitches, such as the game not ending when you run out of health, the menu cursor not aligning properly, and the health bar going into the negatives. I won't be updating the game again until after LD41 is over.

My entry for LD41, finished (if not quite polished) after a hard night of debugging. It's also my first-ever completed PICO-8 game. So proud of myself for getting this done within the Compo deadline, even if I'm gonna be short on sleep for work tomorrow...

'Love Is A Battlefield" combines a bullet-hell shooter with a dating sim. On the surface, it's a game about shooting hearts at coloured circles while your date asks you if you know who Pat Benatar is for the sixth time. Deep down, though, it's about helping others to deal with their insecurities and break down their emotional barriers.

I hope you enjoy it, and feedback is appreciated, especially since this is my first PICO-8 game and the code is probably a horrendous mess!

ld41

ludumdare ludumdare41

v1.1: Fixed boss door, made spikes 'n barrel fairy a bit easier, other things

My entry to Ludum Dare #41 compo! Made in 48hrs from scratch!

The illustrious Rhythm Witch Anemone Reawolf has a problem - her underground storeroom is in complete disarray and the Storemaster's nowhere to be seen. Can you navigate a trap-filled dungeon, rescue the odd fairy and uncover the true mastermind behind all this chaos?!

Witchbeat fuses rhythm-game mechanics with good ol' dungeon delving. Get close (but not too close!) to your enemy and attack in time with the beat. Solve puzzles, find keys, beat up blobs and generally faff about.

Controls: Arrow keys to move. Z to attack/next dialog

It's been an idea I've wanted to try for a while. Some of it works... It's a little buggy, and there's no auto/input lag calibration (might add it later) so it's probably unplayable on some machines, but hopefully it works for the most part!

Happy beats!

DragonXVI

This is my compo submission for LD41.

The 2 incompatible genres are platformer and minigames. Everytime you jump on an enemy you get to play heads or tails. The idea was to have to play a different minigame every time (e.g. like Wario Ware).

Unfortunately I ran out of time, due to some nasty bugs and not having the whole 48 hours available. I shouldn't have spent this much time on the level generation algorithm either.

What's missing:

• fancy backgrounds,
• bleepy music,
• cool sfx,
• many more minigames,
• an actual goal,
• timer
• checkpoints
• score

ld41

Introduction

This is my Ludum Dare 41 entry.
I hope you have fun.

Controls

Move - Arrow keys
Skip - Z key
Menu - Enter/Return key
Controls - X key

Rules

You need to collect elemental points in order to defeat the enemies and increase your score (hidden), by entering the doors. Each door can reward you with 1 or 2 element points of it's kind.

You need to have elemental points of the element that is strong against the enemy, Pokémon style, in order to hit it.

If you move over an enemy while having enough elemental points, it loses 1 shield point, is pushed back and stunned for 1 turn.
If you don't have the required elemental point to hit the enemy, you lose.
If the enemy is against the wall, it takes double damage and dies.

If you move towards an enemy that is 1 cell away from you:
-> If you have the required elemental point, you'll attack it.
-> Otherwise you'll just move closer to it.

If you get hit by an enemy, you lose an elemental point of the enemy kind.
In this case, you'll die if your related elemental point goes under 0.

Elements table

Fire > Water > Rock > Thunder > Fire

Beating the game

Reach the 41th floor

ldjam roguelike permadeath puzzle

Uh... yeah. Sorry about this...

As an retired half-life modder and frequent forum poster, I'm pretty used to the idea of mega-threads. Basically, the modding forums that I often visited had at the very least a "random" thread, which people used almost like a chat.

Some others would also have a WIP thread, which incentivized people to post their WIPs more often, because they didn't need to go through the effort of creating an entirely new thread, just to show off some minor thing they're working on.

So yeah, hate it or love it, I'm just putting the idea forward.

Post what you're working on right now here.

mega-thread

Friday evening I decided I try and spend 10 hours on a game spread over the weekend, without knowing it was LDJAM14. I've managed to clock up about 8hrs on it. It's been really fun. Lots of ugly code, that needs refactoring, and I'm a complete newb at sound & music, so any help gratefully accept there.

The code is up on github https://github.com/pond823/GetToTheChopper