My first PICO-8 cartridge. This is a campfire scene demo set to an 8-bit demake of "I'll Be Around" by Yo La Tengo. 🎵 Enjoy.
(Update 1/5/21 - minor tweaks to track levels)
2 comments
This was made in two weeks for Toy Box Jam 2020, a jam in which we had to make something using only premade graphics/sfx/music assets.
In Super Mumtaz Bros. you join the titular plumbing brothers on their mission to rescue Princess Sana from... chickens?
•Hunt down radioactive chickens by using the Geiger counter!
•Break pipes!
•Repair pipes!
•Run around!
•Climb!
•Platform action!
•Discover secrets!
•Collect trophies!
•No jumping!*
Super Mumtaz Bros. is a highly realistic plumbing simulator that was made in Pico-8 for Toy Box Jam 2 from 18th December 2020 to 3rd January 2020.
Tips
Ali can find chickens stuck in pipes using his Geiger counter. He can then stomp on pipes to get the chickens out.
Bilal can spend money to place new pipes. You'll need to find money to pay for pipes.
The Geiger counter clicks more the closer you are to a chicken. The rings turn orange when you're really close. Stomp the pipe when you're in the right spot!
You can't jump*. So use the terrain to your advantage!
Development
I worked on this steadily over the (initial) two weeks of the jam. Sticking to daily updates on Twitter forced me to stick to developing it on time. The initial mechanics and mechanics were based on Nerdy Teachers' excellent platformer tutorial series on YouTube.
My airy fairy arty farty Peter-Molydeux-style idea/gimmick for this game was 'a platformer game where you can't jump'. Well, turns out you can (sort of) jump, but it's about as useful as jumping is in real life. Also, I thought it would be funny to make a Mario game where you actually have to do some plumbing.
Trivia
Mumtaz Brother is a real shop in the town where I grew up. The shop owners are a little eccentric; besides plumbing and D.I.Y. supplies they have at various times also sold groceries, rented out Bollywood videos, you name it. They expanded their business by opening a second plumbers merchants... next door to their original shop. If you can't find something in one shop, 'try next next door.'
Version history
1.04 Fixed another version of the character swap/wall collision bug from 1.03, added sound effects to tutorial objectives, changed the size of tutorial objective boxes and changed the size of Bilal's target box
1.03 Fixed a bug that let players move through walls by holding the character swap button
1.02 Fixed a bug when climbing, improved the tutorial
1.01 Fixed a typo, adjusted ending requirements
1.0 Initial release
Introduction
Hello, i hope everyone is having a good 2021 so far :)
A good friend of mine ( @dad Jr.) introduced me to Pico-8 back in November 2020, and i set about looking for a tutorial on youtube to learn the Pico-8 interface and how lua works in general. Coming from Python the syntax was a little weird but was easy enough to get around (i hate tables).
Eventually i found a video series from Dylan Bennett ( @MBoffin) describing how to create a simple top down adventure game
After that @dad Jr. and I collaborated, and today we believe we have a demo ready for use!
Mally and the Missing Manuscript
Setting
You are Mally, an archivist working for the local museum.
One day a patron requests to see a manuscript from the old archives located in the ruined basement, a place no one has been in since the museum was rebuilt years ago.
Can you safely traverse the old archives, and find the missing manuscript?
How to Play
Controls
Arrows: Movement / Turn Actions
❎/X/5: Turn Actions
🅾️/Z/4: Contextual Actions
Items
Bombs
- Can Destroy cracked walls and skeletons. Inert when planted, Must be activated by using contextual action button.
- Takes 3 turns to detonate.
- Bombs explosions can be chained together to produce traps for enemies, given you've found or purchased enough bombs to do it.
Ink Pens
- Used to stun skeletons.
- Skeletons stay stunned for 2 turns.
Planned / To-Do
-
Additional Floors
Currently there is only a single floor implemented, but more are in the works. -
Museum Gift shop
Currently this is implemented in the demo museum gift shop (the spawn area), but is not very utilized as there is only a single floor to the old archives.
This map also must be updated with more details as right now its a barren empty room. -
Token Optimization (Pass #5 or so)
- Player / Enemy Movement / Tile Transition Animation
Credits / Citations
-
Game Programming: @zerkdev
-
Game Art: @dad Jr.
-
Top-Down Adventure Game Tutorial / Additional Game Art: Dylan Bennett / @MBoffin (Adventure game Tutorial Youtube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdLmU93eWisKpyk1WZywUSYAq5dkCPFIv / https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=35135)
-
dark() & circmap functions: @cubee (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=38881) - This was amazing and helped completely change the feel of the game. Thank you so much!
-
All contributors of the Pico-8 Token Optimizations GitHub Projects: https://github.com/seleb/PICO-8-Token-Optimizations
- lua-users.org table inheritance tutorial: http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial
Tiny puzzle game made in a few hours for the discord jam #5.
Apply mutations to DNA to match the target.
Known issues:
- Levels generated are usually too easy and can be solved without using all the mutations offered.
Have fun!
a little game idea i've been toying around with. i've set my goal for 2021 to move forward with it and get some levels completed and publish a cart, even if for my own amusement! :D
hello,
I just received my PiBoy from ExperimentalPi (it's running retropie) and, although Pico-8 is working fine with an external usb keyboard, I can't succeed in mapping/registering the integrated joypad and buttons with Pico-8.
did anyone figure it out?
thanks a grand
Description
My submission for #toyboxjam2. It's PICO-8 clone of Snood! Match 3 or more snoods in a row to clear them or even make other surrounding snoods fall. Clear all the snoods to beat each level. Keep an eye on your Danger meter! Each time it fills the snoods inch closer to the bottom. Once they're low enough you lose. Making snoods fall will lower your Danger meter.
Controls
- Left and Right -- Rotate launcher left and right
- X -- Launch snood
- Z -- Hold in conjunction with Left or Right to aim more precise shots
Entry for the One Hour Game Jam 297th, Theme: Follow.
A Shadow is following you, and you need to reach the Goal. Your Shadow(s) also need to reach a Goal.
Note:
It took me four Hours instead of only one to make this Cart. It would be dishonest to other Jammers if I would hide that fact^^.
I like the Idea, maybe I'll work on some more Levels and a better presentation, but I really don't know atm^^.
Have Fun!
Low-Rez pixel art is the great equalizer.
Anyone can do low-rez pixel art and make it look at least decent.
There was a high school teacher that taught his students how to code homebrew games on the Game Boy Advance via emulators and a flash cart.
While this teachers deserves applause, ultimately all the student projects looked amateurish next to commercial Game Boy Advance games.
The fuze basic for the Nintendo Switch also appeals to students but it relies on a pre-packaged library of professional 3d assets. Simply reusing professional assets leads to a mish-mash of styles. Your own artwork next to these assets also looks unflattering.
The low rez resolution and reduced color palette of pico-8 makes for more visual consistency. Yes professional pixel artists will still produce better looking games but the beginners art does not look like crap in comparison either.
You can still be a one-man shop like in the days of bedroom coding in the UK of the eighties. Instead of being at least a artist/coder duo.
Experience all game genres in bite-sized chunks.
As today's big games are too time-consuming for many of us in the later stages of adulthood, PICO-8 games take 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete and can always be finished in one evening. What's more, they are so focused because of the size restrictions there is never any filler. Most of them are pure joy. Not a drag, not a grind.
Timeless.
The pico-8 community is vibrant. There are many passing trends, but pico-8 has been around for 6 years now.
In a sense retro computing is timeless because if I read an issue of retro gamer from 2012 it features the same stories it does today. Once old, those simple games don't really get any older. They become classics. And so PICO-8 is timeless too.
PICO-8 vs vintage computing.
Some prefer to work with real hardware constraints and code for the C64, the Game Boy, the NES. But if most players run those games inside emulators anyway what's the point? PICO-8 also has arbitrary constraints, but they are more fun.
Introduction
In Dice Mice, players take the role as a posh mouse fighting through trash monsters that have taken over your land. In your disposal you have five dice that can be used for attacking the monsters five different cores.
Defeat monsters by attacking their heart core, but just focusing on that core won’t do you any good, you have to take into account the attack and defence core as well. If you are feeling adventurous during a fight then try to go for a quintuple for an instant victory!
Just know that if things get tough there is always the flee core; run from the battle and try a new one! Maybe the next encounter will be in your favor? Or if you are in a real pinch, try to build on the bandage core to heal during battle!
After each defeated monster you earn loot, you will need it to defeat your nemesis!
May the odds be ever in your favor!
Controls
Keyboard: Arrow keys, Z and X
Controller: D-pad / Joystick, A and B
Credits
Sebastian Lind Twitter
If you like the game, it would be awesome if you buy it on itch.io, it supports further development of more games.
Controls
Left/Right - Walk on Bubbles
X - Jump
What is this?
This morning I was thinking about one of Spelunky 2's bosses, and older games like Bubble Bobble, and was just sort of working out how a platformer jumping on bubbles would work. I decided I'd try and knock out a game in a day and just started hacking on it.
Ended up having some errands to run and projects to work on around the house, but for working on a thing off and on this is a decent start. There's nothing to do yet besides jump around on the bubbles. I'll probably just have some basic collectible, a high score system, sounds, and a game over screen and call it done.
One of my goals for 2021 is to complete a small game each week so I want to be better about identifying my design goals and cutting scope.
Credits
Music by Gruber (https://www.patreon.com/Gruber99)
Character Design from https://modsama.itch.io/4ssplatform
Happy New Year.
Best wishes to all PICO -8 users.
新年あけましておめでとうございます。
PICO-8ユーザーの皆様に幸多かれん事を。
A zero gravity platformer
Controls:
Move - Arrows
Jump - Z
Double Jump - X + Arrows
Music is from Picotunes2
Per this discussion, I wanted to mockup a potential new idea for the Pico8 editor, to better incorporate some of the undocumented features that are being used more and more often by people. The 32 color extended palette is the major one, which I still think does not play nice with the existing editors, for three reasons:
- Repeatedly tweaking the colors in your art requires you to look up arbitrary numbers and re-type them into a line of code, which introduces a huge delay that makes doing this in Pico8 very unpleasant. Some tools have been coded by other people to help you with this in-game, but I'm talking about the editor itself. The current art tabs don't work with the alt colors at all, and color is important enough that this is kind of making them unusable in their current state. I feel like every game I've played in the past year here has tweaked at least one color from the starting 16 into an alternate, so it's a huge use case.
- When you poke(0x5f2e,1) to preserve the palette in editor screens, it really messes up the code/sfx/music editor tabs, where colors are very important for communicating information. If I'm tweaking art and code at the same time, in that wonderful Pico8 way, I have to keep uncommenting and running a for loop that resets the palette and stops() at the top of my code tab, or just accept the weird colors in the code tab now. Duplicate colors can even make the text in the console completely disappear!
- Running special code to get the editors to look right is really hacky, and may not even be possible if you've maxed out your tokens on the game code. Shouldn't this palette feature be something that is saved with the cart ROM permanently, and only affect specific areas of specific tabs? Shouldn't a fresh startup change the palette on load, and be easy to tweak even if your code is completely broken, and doesn't run at all?
This is my suggestion for a quick fix: a hardware settings tab (see the thunderbolt icon in the top bar). To avoid scaring newcomers, this tab might be hidden until you triple-click the sprite tab, or gets enabled with some other quick, documented shortcut. It enables access to a lot of the values in the hardware state that are commonly used in a "set it and forget it" kind of way. I think these settings should be saved in cart ROM, and booted up when a cart is loaded or directly run.
The idea is to use the scanline mode for two distinct palettes: ART and GUI. The top and bottom red bars would always use the GUI palette, as would the code/sfx/music/console tabs. ART would be used on scanlines in the sprite and map tabs only, like so:
(notice the red UI bars and gray tools, but correct palettes in the art scanlines)
This plan is not perfect (the art cursors still go weird, and the colors not being selectable on the sprite or map tab directly makes them less easily tweaked), but it goes a long way to making a 16-color palette from the 32 total colors a lot more usable in a limited display, as well as exposing some useful features that 99% of people don't know about right now. Without something like this, I have personally resorted to just not making art in Pico8 anymore, because importing a spritesheet is easier than coding with mostly arbitrary numbers every time I want to tweak the art palette.
Also, a good half of the time when I'm giving tech advice, it involves linking people to the memory page from the fan site. These undocumented features are very useful in a variety of ways, and I think mid-tier experienced people would appreciate more direct access to them than a code command. Especially since the hardware settings that get poked at the very beginning of carts (like mouse+keyboard access or screen mode) rarely ever get un-set afterwards, so it makes sense to save those settings in the cartridge.
Anyway, happy to hear comments and alternate ideas. I just think the second palette has grown much bigger than expected, and Pico8's editors aren't totally set up for it right now.
I like powers of 2 and I like seeing odometers roll-over, so I created this little cart to help celebrate those mathematical milestone birthdays.
First test of motorbike V0.1
Her is my work in progresse little project, motorbike
at the beginning i just wanted to learn how to make paralax
there is barely anything, just a few sprit and a very basique hitbox system
that's it.
A PICO-8 Katamari-like for Toy Box Jam 2. Instructions are included in-game.