Very cute game, the polish is nice with the music, the cute sprites and the UI that reminded me of playing Final Fantasy in my childhood.
For me the initial screen stays black, until I press X. At first I felt like the only enemies were slime. Maybe the amount of damage can be highlighted in red or something, so that the player doesn’t have to read through all the battle messages.
The start screen has some intro music, pressing x skips the intro trumpets, but if you wait for the trumpets part to end the screen shows up as well! Thank you, I appreciate the comparison. I based the original design off of Dragon Warrior, one of the original Final Fantasy's main competitors, lol.
I actually wanted to add some colored text, and I fought a couple of time to come up with a way to do it without going over Pico-8's token limit, but it just wasn't doable. At the end I was commenting out old code and optimizing things just to make sure I could get the menus and enemies I have. The way I have the text system setup, is I give it a single long string, and I wrote a function that divides that into 5 strings of 25 characters, and if there's any more it add it's to a buffer which loads the next window. I added in a parse check for ! to be a command character, and then I could pick a number to add a color and it would check all numbers until a space so I could get up to the 16 colors. But it was very costly.
