Vacay Volley
by Ellery J. Reyes
To celebrate the last days of summer, join Ollie on the beach in Vacay Volley!
Vacay Volley is a simple game where you juggle a ball in the air as long you can without letting it touch the ground. Watch out for wandering crabs and gulls while aiming for red balloons. Hitting 3 balloons will temporarily double your points. Dive if the ball is out of reach. Thanks for playing!
Controls
Arrow Keys or D-Pad to Move
Z or 🅾️ to Jump
X or ❎ to Dive
P to Pause
To return to the main menu, pause and select "Back to start"
Credits
Design, Programming, Art, Music, and SFX



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PICO-1K Jam 2023
The 3rd annual PICO-8 1K Jam (#Pico1k) has now started! 🥳
🌐 https://itch.io/jam/pico-1k-2023
You have until the end of September to make cool things in PICO-8
...by using only 1K (1024) Compressed Bytes of code 🗜️
No pre-defined Sprites, Maps, SFX or Music data allowed.
ALL content must be created using code.
It can be a:
🕹️ Game
🎞️ Demo (Animated or Interactive)
🛠️ Tool or Utility
...whatever you can fit within 1KB, basically!
It's a relaxed, non-competitive jam, running for a whole month.
Please refer to the PICO-1K Jam page for Rules, FAQ & Resources & more info.


Pico-View webzine for August 2023 is out now!
Here's the lineup:
-Cover Art and Gallery by PJBGamer
-What is a Lerp - Fletch
-Making Music with Loops - c.diffin
-Game Jam Interviews & Lineups - Nerdy Teachers
-Featured Interview: Canyon Crisis Team ft. Marina
-Featured Game Review: Occult Gunner - Achie
-PICO-1k Jam Announcement - Liquidream
-Cre8 Jam Announcement - Pico-8 Gamer
-The Death of a Frog - Marina
-New Release Recommendations
-Prototype Party - Color Combo
Once again thank you to everyone who participates, contributes, and reads the zine! I hope you all had a wonderful month of August, and here's to an even better September!
Happy Reading 🤓
https://nerdyteachers.com/PICO-8/Pico-View/?issue=8

The Death Of A Frog-

Introduction-
I come into this month from what might be my greatest failure as a game developer and artist- "Frogs vs Ghosts". Based off artwork by Jake Hall and developed for the "A Game By It's Cover" jam (a game jam where you pick from hundreds of imaginary Famicom game cartridges made months earlier).

This article will cover my mistakes while sharing my lessons during the development of "Frogs vs Ghosts". It took two months to make it realize it wouldn't ship and will continue to go unshipped. It reached the finish line (without polish), but it was not a good game. The two greatest reasons for this were: OVERSCOPING and LACK OF GAME-CORE.
Overscoping-
The worst mistake was made during the most critical part of the art process, choosing which project to pursue. I went over all my options, and chose the one I wanted to make the most: "Frogs vs Ghosts". I did not consider the amount of motivation and time it would take to finish my grand turn-based brawler/collect-athon with 16 characters (this sounds silly in hindsight)... That's a lie. I assumed I could replenish my motivation, and do more work in less time. This is a textbook example of overscoping.




Hi all! It's time once again to start building a PICO-8 holiday calendar thing of some kind. Usually we keep the games a secret while they're in development, so each game is a surprise when it releases in the calendar. If you're interested in participating, shoot me a DM on Discord (thetomster) and I'll get you added to the server where we coordinate things!
We're looking for winter or holiday themed games, and games will need to be wrapped up by the end of November. As we get closer to the deadline we'll look at how many games we have and make a decision about what format to run. The past couple years we've run it as a "twelve days of christmas" thing, but if we get enough sign ups it would be great to get back to a full 25-day calendar.
Interested in joining? DM me on Discord (my username there is thetomster)!
You were born in an unassuming star system but your fate lies in
The Heavens

Carve a path through the stars, conquer asteroids, colonize planets, and unearth the mysteries of an ancient alien race as you build your stellar empire. Your ultimate goal? Chart a course to the edge of the known universe!
The universe awaits — are you ready?
Controls & How to Play
Master your controls to navigate the cosmic playground:
Directional Pad
Thrusters: Hold the UP button to engage.
Turning: Use LEFT and RIGHT to maneuver your ship.
Mini-map: Hold DOWN to view your galactic surroundings.









This prototype was made for Pico-View, a monthly web-zine hosted on NerdyTeachers.com.
This month's prototype is named "Color Combo". It is a template for building your own game similar to DanceDanceRevolution or Magicka.
The main mechanic in this prototype is to detect the combination of button inputs of the arrows in order to create different colors. This game has 6 different colors, which you can turn into elements, potions, weapons, anything! We kept it simple with just color matching.
- left = blue
- right = yellow
- up = red
The secondary colors are made by combining the appropriate primary colors.
- left+right = green
- left+up = purple
- right+up = orange
We decided to use down arrow as the submit button but you could include down as a fourth primary element, and increase the total number of combinations possible. We also only used a max of 2 input mixtures, but you could expand it to 3, but be careful because this will quickly multiply into too many possible combinations.
Go ahead and tweak, add, re-theme, and build whatever you want on this and let's make some great input-combo games!
Don't forget to share it here on the BBS with the tag "prototype-party" so we can see what you were inspired to create. And keep your eyes out for more in the coming issues of Pico-View!
Read the full issue here:
Pico-View #8 - August 2023: https://nerdyteachers.com/PICO-8/Pico-View/?issue=8
I am pleased to announce Questionable PICO-8 Audio (QPA), a compressed audio format for PICO-8.
(Compatibility note: if you encoded any QPA files before 2023-09-07, please see the Changes section below.)
DON'T YOU LECTURE ME WITH YOUR 30K PICO-8 CART
Oh, but I will!
Your song is synced with the clipboard - you can copy your songs out to text files (or this thread!) and paste song strings back in to the cart. You can right-click samples to preview them, and you can right-click the play button to skip the intro sample. Numeric modifiers come before the thing they modify. Hopefully you can figure out the rest!
Copy/paste is a little annoying on the web player, and PCM audio can also be unreliable on the web, so consider trying this cart on desktop PICO-8 if you have it.









