This took me a couple of goes to get to grips with, but that's the nature of jam games — it's really hard to make a good tutorial when the game mechanics aren't locked in until the last possible minute. Also part of it was getting confused by click-to-shoot without point-to-aim. But it was fun once I got into it though, and the presentation is really nice. I like how the gameplay suddenly switches from "avoid getting hit" mode to "get back to the elevator right now" mode without any actual mechanical changes.
Andrew
Creator of
Recent community posts
I had fun with this! It's very reminiscent of the "mega mushroom" thing from Mario but it's good and satisfying to grow — the music and alternate sound effects really sell it. The downside really is just the waiting around while flies spawn in the sky or below the floor and that should be an easy post-jam tidy up.
I think if I expand on this in the future I want to try having more modules but they're easier to lose. Maybe taking a hit to one damages the ones next to it and then you lose them? There's a mechanic where losing a module detaches everything that was only attached through that module so if they vanished after 20s that would be a nightmare..... unless.... maybe it could only be for the outermost ones, so there's a motivation to keep grabbing pointless ones just to protect your good ones? That might work? IDK
Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with the level design — left to my own devices I'd have kept adding block types and mechanics but the PICO-8 completely ran out of clock cycles so it forced me to actually make some content instead and I'm really glad it did. 🙂
I might expand it one day, there's a fair bit I'd like to fix up — I had grand plans for letting you bounce blocks around on your head, for example, which would have helped with the "getting stuck under things" problem and opened up some new possibilities, but there was no way it was happening on a PICO-8 in two days.