Publishing my first game using PICO-8
boyter.org
boyter.org
He got really into defining the sprites, levels and sounds, and that took him into coding movement and enemies and different bullets for the character.
It's pretty cool but I get overly annoyed that it has strict source code limits.
Hopefully the token limit is what dominates coding most of the time, since it's significantly more realistic.
Good insight. Some folks trip over themselves to say “you gotta prototype something to see if it’s fun” but the reality is that a lot of stuff is not fun without the juicy bits
Further, the “is it fun question” is honestly a nonsense question. That’s usually a question about the larger game loop. A lot of games’ gameplay that people like is in fact not actively “fun” but is perhaps engaging or immersive. Which is not something you deduce easily from barebones prototypes.
This advice works ok if it’s just an arcade style game that you play and that’s it, but that’s not really common
Some kind of immersion is a prerequisite to a worthwhile experience. Sound is a pretty cheap and effective feedback medium for player actions, it quickly helps to define and telegraph changes in environments and settings (¿is this a safe encounter or the prelude to a boss fight?) and is crucial in helping to keep engagement during non-playable segments (in the earlier days, sometimes even printing dialogue text to screen was accompanied by sound effects to avoid alienating the player).
A laugh track doesn't really change the narrative or the experience that much, except on comedies which are only barely funny to begin with. You could remove the laugh tracks of any of my favorite comedies and I'd enjoy them maybe 1% less.
But games like Fallout NV, Doom, the GBA-era Pokemon games, would be a whole lot less immersive (and less fun) without their amazing soundtracks.
https://github.com/tmountain/pico-8-typescript
Nothing against Lua, but it might be uncharted territory for some people.
One of its advantages over TIC-80 is that you can program games in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. The games are tiny pure Wasm "carts" that can run on any Wasm runtime, from the browser to Nintendo 3DS.
> September 18th 20203 - I think im actually going to commit...
One of these weekends I need to just sit down and finish my Pico-8 game. The gameplay is working fully (minus a couple nice to haves I wanted to add), I was just stuck on menu and logo design and sound/music when I drifted off.
It's a pretty nice system and fun to play with. I recommend it.
How do the different opponents work? Are they using some sort of known strategies? Seems like they would follow a pattern and once you figured it out you could defeat them. How far does it go?