8 Bit Caaz

Examining game development, now with more bits!

[8bit-caaz]

My Education vs Education Today

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? 

Anyway the point is I’ve been playing with game development for most of my life. However, I’ve never played around with 3D Game Dev. (Aside from making 3D tetris using Three.js and shenanigans) It’s been a wild ride to figure out the basics but following some tutorials has gotten me to a point that I feel comfortable enough to continue.

Something I found interesting while learning is the fact that the source I learned this from was a Youtube channel called KidsCanCode, and that is amazing to me. When I was a kid I didn’t have resources like that, I went to libraries and asked if they had really obscure books for coding, even got some on request so that I could check them out, but that was the limits of my ability to find anything, and it was in no way targeted towards kids.

I am incredibly grateful for these types of channels and teachers that go out of their way to let kids take control of their education and learn what they want to learn because that is something I wish I had when I was younger. It’s become so much easier than it was because of people like them.

We need more content like KidsCanCode and I hope to one day get to the point where I can teach more advanced types of concepts and pass it on to the younger generation who will easily outpace me and steal my job in the future.

[8bit-caaz]

Delunky, Endless Descent!

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

Spelunky is an amazing game and if you haven’t played it, at least give the clasic version a try. Most people who read my blog has probably already watched Mark Brown’s video on Spelunky before, so if you really want to know what the game’s about, watch that video and you’ll get a rather good idea of what was needed to recreate this game.

Every bit of Delunky feels incredibly true to the original. The controls work perfectly on PICO-8′S limited button scheme, the sprites feel right at home at 8x8 size, the 16 colors available fit perfectly to the caves. 

The tileset is perfect, the aesthetic is spot on, it gets everything right, even down to how terrible I am at it. It’s incredibly fun and I urge my readers to check this gem out. 

Something really cool that I couldn’t help myself to check was the level generation setup, and I am not disappointed. The last sprite page was used for these chunks of levels, and ti’s for procedural generating levels in the game, it’s the driving force giving this game so much replay-ability. 

While I was under the hood I also had to check out the code, and it’s really clean. I have to give some serious respect to Mr. Peitz here. My carts never wind up as organized. And as another note, the tokens are maxed out at an well. Really impressive to have gotten this game down within the limites. I’m sure this required a lot of effort, so I’ve gotta repeat myself. Check this out!

[8bit-caaz]

Picoh Mummy!

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.

Picoh Mummy starts out and immediately i get that retro feel, and while I never owned an Amstrad CPC, I’m sure it felt the same. Starting the game immediately throws you into the action. There’s an instruction manual built into the game that explains how to play, the various items that increase your score, and the details on mummies. But the game explains itself fairly well without all of that

As you wander about the corridors of the pyramid, you notice the footsteps trailing behind you and this is a pretty big hint. circling around one of the pillars reveals what’s inside, some of which just increase your score, some pop out a mummy, and some give you a bit of a shield essentially. the mummies you leave in a level follow you to the next, and if you’re not careful, you wind up overwhelmed with mummies everywhere!

Once you get used to playing you realize it’s kind of optimal to start revealing the items all at once, that way if you do stumble upon the hidden mummy, you won’t have to do much and can run out of the level. What’s interesting about this game, and the game it’s based on is this game is basically just this. there’s no fancy mechanics, no complicated inputs, movement is simple, you’re even on a grid. Despite all that, it’s still fun. 

Older systems did game development different, and I think it was all about the high score board. What this game plays at is your need to get that top score and prove you’re the best. This is a feature you really don’t see very often in games and without it a lot of retro games just wouldn’t be interesting. Think of Pac-Man, or Donkey Kong, even Tetris. It wasn’t so much the fun of playing as it was the challenge of surviving long enough to get to those difficult levels and racking up enough points to finally knock king tut off the scoreboard.

This is a fairly faithful recreation of Oh Mummy, and I admire that, because it’s really not too often I see games recreated that haven’t exactly been talked about much recently. I would’ve never heard of Oh Mummy if it weren’t for this game, and I think it’s useful to go back to these types of things and see how the concept could be improved.

Overall, I’d say Picoh Mummy! Is a good game. It’s true to its vision of recreating a classic. It’s not like the games we see today at all, and it really doesn’t need to be. I’ve talked on game feel and how animations, and effects really effects the feel of games, but with recreations like these I feel it would ruin that feeling of pure nostalgia that I felt when I started playing this.

[8bit-caaz]

The Joy in Being Skinner Boxed

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! 

[8bit-caaz]

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.

[8bit-caaz]

New useless ways to get around. Vaguely reminds me of sm64 backwards long jumping

[8bit-caaz]

Gotta be careful with magic, it’s dangerous.

[8bit-caaz]

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

[8bit-caaz]

Just a teaser of some simple stuff done in my spare time I’m sure p-type is taken as a pico-8 game but I’m too lazy to find out myself.

[8bit-caaz]

Redesigning Ichor

A while back I had described Ichor, a framework I’ve been using to handle state in my games. I’ve been using it fairly consistently however I’ve run into an issue design-wise that I want to overcome. This is basically a personal rant, nothing too in depth here.

Too often in my code do I find a lot of sections in the ichor state where I set the order something similar to this

.set_order('title',{'cls','particle_system','title','stats'})

What you see here is an order using four modules, cls, particle_system, title, stats. But this is bullshit. cls just has a draw function which just calls cls(), particle_system is a module which does have some interesting properties but more often than not I don’t usually want its init function clearing the particles from the game, and stats is fairly useful for drawing stats and is probably the only module I’ve ever used that works in the way I wanted ichor to work.

In title, I have essentially all the functions that actually apply to the state the game is actually in. What I think I’m going to do is make a new layout that follows the following pattern

-- require ichor _ichor.states = { title = { init = function() end, update = function() if btnp() then _ichor'game' end end, draw = function() cls() print('press any key',2,2,7) end }, game = { init = function() end, update = function() end, draw = function() cls() print('you did it!',2,2,7) end }, } -- set ichor state to title _ichor'title' -- add an ichor state after initialization _ichor.states.whatever = { init = function() end, update = function() end, draw = function() end }

[8bit-caaz]

I streamed development of this idea for a racer, I’ve gotta work on some mechanics and maps, but it’s actually pretty fun. Hopefully I’ll have a playable version sometime.

[8bit-caaz]

Just messing with a bit of a concept. Been busy lately with work and a hardware project. Hopefully I’ll have some information on that when I’m finished. In other news I’ve played a lot of r-type 3 on SNES recently. really exciting.

[8bit-caaz]

So how does how your new backup system look like? The one you most certainly set up when you wiped everything?

Aha. Yes. That. Well you see what I did was I didn’t.

[8bit-caaz]

Hello, World

I am back! Sorry for the delays. I’ve been distracted but my level 63 Skyrim character is super cool. So it’s been a few months since I’ve last posted and I genuinely apologize.

I’ve been getting back into the grind though, so fret not, and hopefully you’ll see some of my rants on code in the soon to come PICOZINE #5! I’ve wrote an article on dungeon generation and I’ll likely hold of from throwing that on here until that’s available to the public.

As for my own projects, I have lost them all! I wiped my own system and forgot to back them up. So I’ve slowly been working back at recreating some things and trying some new stuff out so hopefully given a bit of time I’ll be able to have something interesting to show you guys. 

I’ve got a game coming though, so expect some dev logs while I figure out what I’m going to do from here on out. If you’re interested in something specific about game design, please don’t be afraid to ask me! Literally begging for topics right now as I get back into the grind. Let’s get this party started!

[8bit-caaz]

Is Pico 8 worth getting in to?

Depends on what you consider worth it. I find it incredibly enjoyable to deal with the limitations and work out ways around them. I’ve seen people with no skill in game development pick it up and make something playable in a day, it’s great for learning, great for prototyping.

Overall I find it great for making things without having to deal with too many design choices. When you’re working with a bigger framework or engine you’ll find yourself presented with so many possibilities that you can sometimes find yourself overwhelmed not knowing where to start. PICO-8 has a lot of restrictions that sort of force you to go down a certain route whether you want to or not. This tends to speed up actually getting a playable game out there

If you have $15 to throw at it, I would recommend it, I’ve only ever enjoyed PICO-8, and I don’t doubt everyone who tries it out would. There are many other free alternatives, LIKO-12 for example, though I’ve not tried it out myself. If you’re interested in fantasy consoles in general I’d recommend joining the Fantasy Console Discord, plenty of people there know a lot more about the other consoles than I do.

[8bit-caaz]

Hi

hi

[siegfriedcroes]

Celebrating MAR10 day with a super low res pixel art animation! (32x32 resolution, 4 frames and 10 colors)

[8bit-caaz]

Happy MAR10!