Rendering a font from a layered sprite sheet in PICO-8!
This is a pretty complicated one. If you want more information on how I did this, check out my post on Friday for how my layered sprites work. This example is kind of difficult to really show off with just the code, so you can download the whole cart and poke at it to take a look at what’s going on!
I’m writing this before my previous post has even published, but I can say with near certainty that someone will bring up how insane it is to attempt to build a game, publish it, and make any kind of a profit within a month. To them I say, Bah, humbug. I definitely know what I’m doing
So, for the first time ever, I’m going to try and make money off of the next game I produce. So let’s set some goals.
I need to at the very least, break even. Ideally, I’d like to pay a few months of rent. On top of that, I’ve got about a month and a half before I run out of rent money. Welcome to Game Development, Hard Mode. Devlog #1.
Expenses so far, has been only a blender Udemy course, recommended to me by @jaganganesh So, $13. not too bad, I think. I might want a month of google play music to uh, help with the coding process. so let’s just round that up to $20 or so. a few months of rent… well let’s just say I need like $2000 to really feel comfortable. That’ll be my goal. Though, around $400 will buy me some time, and maybe some food.
I have a concept for the game that I feel will encompass many of the game feel topics that I have mentioned before, that I’m going to somehow transmute into a 3D environment. Let’s get it.
So when it comes to game development, PICO-8 isn’t the only engine/platform I’ve played with. I got my start with Game-Editor, a tiny little game engine I begged my mom to buy despite being 10 and on the edge of homeless. Looking back on it I’m very lucky to have that investment in my childhood.
Oh god, the game still works… is that… is that comic sans?
As time has gone on a lot of things have changed, and recently, I’ve stopped using pico-8. I by no means have even gotten close to conquering pico-8 game development, but my goals have reached a height pico-8 cannot reach. It’s because of this, that this blog may have a bit of a change in direction.
I don’t entirely plan on ditching PICO-8, but I’m going to be using Godot for game design for the foreseeable future. I’m still very much interested in seeing the new PICO-8 games released and will definitely write more reviews on them if I get the chance, and of course if someone throws me one. But this blog will no longer be entirely PICO-8. I’ll likely change the theme and name to reflect this change, but that’ll come with time.
I hope to see you all going forward, with my adventure into a whole new dimension in game development, with Godot!
Delunky is an impeccable demake of Spelunky by @johanpeitz created for the DemakeJam 2018, and boy does it get every bit of it right. Everything feels incredibly right at home in the confines of PICO-8, the controls are right, the aesthetics are right, and if I didn’t know any better I’d believe this to be a Celeste scenario
Today I tried out Picoh Mummy, by Road Software! It’s a grid capture game, based on a classic 1984 game called Oh Mummy, and it’s very true to the original.
I’ve reached out to the PICO-8 twitter community recently to collect some games to test and write about. This is one of those games! Say hello to Got Ya, by Enargy A PICO-8 gacha game.
If you don’t know what gacha is, it’s essentially a game that uses on a loot-box style mechanic. Heavily.
Essentially you log in and get a token, which you use to buy these little scratchers and unlock characters, which will be added to your collection. The goal is to collect all of the collection and if you wind up getting something you’ve won before, you get a quarter token to make the loss not too bad.
Supposedly you log in once a day to get a token. There’s a streak counter so it may give you more than one token, but I’m honestly not sure yet. Remind me to go and edit it once I figure out, and trust me I will figure out.
The thing about gacha games is that they’re addicting, and this gets to the very core of that feature. It hooks you in with a few free tokens to unlock a few character and then you have to wait. Sound familiar? This is essentially the strategy a lot of mobile apps these days use to reel you in and keep playing throughout your day.
The game itself is very pleasing, colorful ui, and a nice gallery to browse your collection with a little description on each of the characters. There’s a genuine reward in winning the characters, and I’ll likely be trying to unlock the rest. Supposedly, it’ll have a lot of updates coming october, so I’d recommend unlocking all the characters you can right now before more characters are added!
Last night I released Scribble-8, a tool for creating PICO-8 music for the musically inept! I’ll likely use this to create tracks for future games! Far easier than learning music theory.
Short hop! Trying to get the basics of platforming down here. Thanks to chillpenguin on the PICO-8 Discord for this simplistic idea of how to go about a smash-like jump!
if btn(2) then
if t.ground then
t.ground = false
t.vel_y= -3.5
t.short_hop = 3
else
if t.short_hop == 0 then
t.vel_y -= 1.5
end
end
end