What an incredible achievement! Making this kind of 3D game in pico 8 with only two buttons and directional movement seems like quite the challenge. The game works surprisingly well. I found the flickery wall sprites made my eyes hurt a bit after playing. I didn’t really enjoy the combat until my second play when I figured out “hold fire to strafe” (thanks to your gifs). After that, I got to gun 4 and really started enjoying combat (even tricky bits against high enemies). The final room was great – tons of power ups and less frustrating jumping than the earlier jumping puzzle.
Nice work!
One question: what is that constant bam bap bap noise? Sounds like an enemy is walking against a wall somewhere.
Thanks for playing! I need to make the strafing feature more obvious somehow.
The gunner enemies can see you through walls right now, so you can almost always hear them trying to shoot at you. Sounds do not dampen over distance, so they are pretty obnoxious.
Wow, this is pretty impressive. The aliasing effects really hurt my eyes, but for a pico-8 3d shooter it looks good and plays pretty nice. The strafe-while-holding-fire-button idea is pretty clever. Minor thing: when you walk to close to a wall, the player is drawn half. Sometimes that makes enemies difficult to see too.
Thanks! I agree that the graphics are a nauseating mess right now lol. I think the dithering is a far-from-perfect way to handle fog. Trust me though, it looks SO much worse without it lol.
Yea, walls are a suggestion in this game rather than a rule lol. The collision detection is embarrasingly simple. I settled for "good enough" just to make sure i finished. If i polish this up the collisions are gonna get some TLC.
My biggest visual gripe is that enemies are SO hard to see. I had envisioned you hitting them with your "rainbow gun" and they would become colorful, but i never added that part, so i left with these blah grey enemies that you can barely see lol. I think they might need flashing lights attahed to them so you can see them.
Solid shooter gameplay here, really fun and old-school, felt like playing some forgotten Doom clone back from when people still called them that. The combination of auto-targeting and strafe-lock whilst shooting works really well with Pico-8's limited controls. Shooters can be awkward without mouselook, but this just works.
I like the fact it's viewed from a third person perspective, it's not something you see often in this style of shooter and it gives the game a lot more personality.
I wish the enemies were a bit bigger or were brighter colours to stand out from the backgrounds more--they can be quite hard to see when they're far away. That aside, great game, awesome work!
Thanks! The gameplay is definitely not for everyone, i was more concerned with "if" i could do this than "should" i do this :) . Thanks for noticing the sprite! I was going for Cdr Keen meets Rainbow Brite.
Thanks! I can't take too much credit for the tech - I built this off a raycaster demo that comes bundled with pico-8. There are some really insane 3d experiments happening in pico8, including but not limited to a DOOM wad.
Haha, this definitely sort of controls like the pre-Mario 64 days. Thanks for playing!
On the bright side, this feels similar to duke nukem 3d when played in third person mode, which I Iiked doing sometimes back in the day. Even has better controls. On the other hand, this feels similar to duke nukem 3d's physics, too. I had a lot of trouble with the platforming.
Overall, it's pretty good. I can't think of any way to make it better that wouldn't either be hard to do with pico-8 (like adding a strafe button), or just require making more of it. I guess the textures aren't a very good match for the character and enemies, but I think fixing that without making the game more boring would require a higher resolution, which would defeat the point.
This game definitely suffers from ambition. The physics are flat-out bad - I never alotted any time to improve them beyond what is included in the cast demo, and they are not great.. I thought the auto-targeting would solve the strafing issue, but it didnt quite knock it out.
I'm also not super-happy about the texutres. I had originally envisioned this as more of a "explore an alien planet" game, and so i picked out dreary textures for my sprite sheet. By the time i pivoted to a more colorful character, I didn't have time to work in a bunch of pallet swaps.
I did all of the level design in about 1 hour at the end lol. Most of the development time I had 1 test room with a lump of all the interactables for testing.
I may try to polish this up - I think there's potential. Thanks for playing!
Comments
Really neat game! I included it in my Toy Box Jam 3 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)
What an incredible achievement! Making this kind of 3D game in pico 8 with only two buttons and directional movement seems like quite the challenge. The game works surprisingly well. I found the flickery wall sprites made my eyes hurt a bit after playing. I didn’t really enjoy the combat until my second play when I figured out “hold fire to strafe” (thanks to your gifs). After that, I got to gun 4 and really started enjoying combat (even tricky bits against high enemies). The final room was great – tons of power ups and less frustrating jumping than the earlier jumping puzzle.
Nice work!
One question: what is that constant bam bap bap noise? Sounds like an enemy is walking against a wall somewhere.
Thanks for playing! I need to make the strafing feature more obvious somehow.
The gunner enemies can see you through walls right now, so you can almost always hear them trying to shoot at you. Sounds do not dampen over distance, so they are pretty obnoxious.
Wow, this is pretty impressive. The aliasing effects really hurt my eyes, but for a pico-8 3d shooter it looks good and plays pretty nice. The strafe-while-holding-fire-button idea is pretty clever. Minor thing: when you walk to close to a wall, the player is drawn half. Sometimes that makes enemies difficult to see too.
Thanks! I agree that the graphics are a nauseating mess right now lol. I think the dithering is a far-from-perfect way to handle fog. Trust me though, it looks SO much worse without it lol.
Yea, walls are a suggestion in this game rather than a rule lol. The collision detection is embarrasingly simple. I settled for "good enough" just to make sure i finished. If i polish this up the collisions are gonna get some TLC.
My biggest visual gripe is that enemies are SO hard to see. I had envisioned you hitting them with your "rainbow gun" and they would become colorful, but i never added that part, so i left with these blah grey enemies that you can barely see lol. I think they might need flashing lights attahed to them so you can see them.
Thanks for playing! rest your eyes!
Solid shooter gameplay here, really fun and old-school, felt like playing some forgotten Doom clone back from when people still called them that. The combination of auto-targeting and strafe-lock whilst shooting works really well with Pico-8's limited controls. Shooters can be awkward without mouselook, but this just works.
I like the fact it's viewed from a third person perspective, it's not something you see often in this style of shooter and it gives the game a lot more personality.
I wish the enemies were a bit bigger or were brighter colours to stand out from the backgrounds more--they can be quite hard to see when they're far away. That aside, great game, awesome work!
Wow, 3D work is impressive. Did not get very far. I'm not good at shooters.
Also super cute what you did with the Neat-o sprite.
Thanks! The gameplay is definitely not for everyone, i was more concerned with "if" i could do this than "should" i do this :) . Thanks for noticing the sprite! I was going for Cdr Keen meets Rainbow Brite.
Perhaps this is what Captain Neat-o dreams about at night.
Holy crap. I don't know a lot about PICO-8, but I'm pretty sure this game is doing something like what some demosceners are doing with C64s.
Also, my Croc 2 PTSD has resurfaced slightly! :)
Freaking amazing!
Thanks! I can't take too much credit for the tech - I built this off a raycaster demo that comes bundled with pico-8. There are some really insane 3d experiments happening in pico8, including but not limited to a DOOM wad.
Haha, this definitely sort of controls like the pre-Mario 64 days. Thanks for playing!
On the bright side, this feels similar to duke nukem 3d when played in third person mode, which I Iiked doing sometimes back in the day. Even has better controls. On the other hand, this feels similar to duke nukem 3d's physics, too. I had a lot of trouble with the platforming.
Overall, it's pretty good. I can't think of any way to make it better that wouldn't either be hard to do with pico-8 (like adding a strafe button), or just require making more of it. I guess the textures aren't a very good match for the character and enemies, but I think fixing that without making the game more boring would require a higher resolution, which would defeat the point.
Thanks! It does have a very duke nukem feel.
This game definitely suffers from ambition. The physics are flat-out bad - I never alotted any time to improve them beyond what is included in the cast demo, and they are not great.. I thought the auto-targeting would solve the strafing issue, but it didnt quite knock it out.
I'm also not super-happy about the texutres. I had originally envisioned this as more of a "explore an alien planet" game, and so i picked out dreary textures for my sprite sheet. By the time i pivoted to a more colorful character, I didn't have time to work in a bunch of pallet swaps.
I did all of the level design in about 1 hour at the end lol. Most of the development time I had 1 test room with a lump of all the interactables for testing.
I may try to polish this up - I think there's potential. Thanks for playing!