Zepton – a Pico-8 voxel shoot'em up [game] | Hacker News Reader

Zepton – a Pico-8 voxel shoot'em up [game]

lexaloffle.com

198 pointschiptune36 comments

I just got the Voxatron and PICO-8 bundle. This is how my kids will learn to program! I love everything about these projects. I just started working on a Robotron: 2084/Smash TV style game idea with LÖVE but I think using Voxatron is going to be way more fun for me. The first cartridge in the list is a Robotron: 2084 style game.

http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php

One question about Voxatron: Can it run on something small (eg. a Raspberry Pi, Gigabyte Brix, or NUC) and played through a regular HDMI TV? And how about using it with a game controller? It seems like this would make a great little "console".

> System Requirements: To play Voxatron, you'll need Windows, Linux or a Mac with a 800MHz cpu and any video card.

http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php

Saw big pixels. Expected something 2600-esque. Was very pleasantly surprised - smooth and fun!

If I may be lazy and ask instead of reading all the docs right now - how much processing power would it take to implement PICO-8? I know you say there's RasPI support but this feels like it deserves to run on a proper 8-bit micro, not just a small Linux SoC.

It use lua for the logic so i thing it will need a bit more processing power than that. Maybe it will run on something supported by elua: http://www.eluaproject.net/overview/status

Something like this: https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

Available on itch.io as well! https://chiptune.itch.io/zepton

so much <3

Good job. Just for the clarification, it is well a voxel engine, but not a "2D" one as it makes no sense (voxel means VOlume piXEL, which is a 3D unit box, compared to a 2d unit-rectangle for the pixel), but a real 3d voxel engine. The good old method to make a voxel like that (specifically, a terrain) is to iterate over the screen column then to iterate over the 'z' coordinate in (3d) world-space. Those loops, for screen space, for world space, is quite an interesting hack of early graphics programming. However, in the case of this game, it seems the renderer works more like a for x-world for z-world, draw square.

it's actually a full 2d voxel made only of rectangles, using the classic position_(x|y) / position_z * focale method, and drawing them from farthest to nearest z :)

Oh yeah, of course you prefer to render the rectangles like that, my mistake. I insist on the 3d terminology though :)

It feels reminiscent of AMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)

Worked somewhat well on mobile, now that impresses.

The gravity mechanic is cool. When you take-out an enemy it falls out of the sky and you can still crash into it.

Cool! Reminds me of SEGA's Thunderblade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfhRzhbXAPc

Amazing feat for the PICO-8 :)

I wonder why sometimes the view is blurred, and sometimes it's sharp (looks like some post-processing on the image)?

on the image? wich one? :)

The actual game canvas. It seems to switch between bilinear filtering or nearest-neighbor scaling. FF 52 on linux here.

I love this kind of games with retro design but slightly new capabilities (instead of completely new engine/rendering).

Also PICO8 cartridges are PNG images with the image in the style of an old cartridge (Example: http://www.lexaloffle.com/gfx/jelpi.p8.png). That almost make them feel like something physical and perfectly fits into the theme. I think that's the smartest design choice I have seen in recent years.

Heh, having just found an Atari Lynx with games, it does fit the style of the era.

A pain for me to control with bad hand-eye but a really neat game. You did a great job with it. Cool stuff.

i added mouse control for the next update!

give it a try here -> lol.pm/zepton.html (beta version)

to enable the mouse, you have to press "p" or enter key to access the "pause menu" and select "mouse / button" option :)

MUUUUUCH BETTER!! I was blastin them fools so good on that one! :)

good! I'm totally happy of that :D

also, I added a new weapon, try to press z and x at same time :)

Oh, scheming up ways to get me back in the game, eh? At first, I thought it was a glitch or something that can't be what it appears. Then, I find you actually added God Mode to the game. ;)

Reminds me of a smoother Zaxxon. Great job!

Kind of the FPS version of Zaxxon for the Atari 2600 (which was woefully underpowered to do it)

point voxels! :D

I've always wanted to try point voxels out. Ace of Spades uses them for models.

awesome work!

thank you! it's more like "rectangle" voxel than point voxel :D

Awesome work. oO

AMOUR <3

omg, I love the colors!

thank you! btw it's a bit hard to manage since PICO-8 is 16-colors fixed-palette engine :D

nice :)

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