itch.io

I enjoyed playing this, thanks! It took me some time to wrap my head around it, and even the Easy AI was cleaning my clock with about 70% of the territory, but I managed a comeback. I'm impressed a board this dense still worked well within the 128x128 pixel constraints.

This is a delightful to play (and deceptively strategic) game, thank you! Even when I was plateauing at about 30 points I found it fun to pick up during breaks waiting for the bus... then 50 seemed doable consistently, and then today I had a run where I kept stopping to think before giving up on an impossible (or is it?) situation, and made it to 154.

I like the strategy in choosing when and what to upgrade (running around with a risky exposed beak, waiting for gold opposite a mirror, or skipping a deadend silver coin...), and the sneakily powerful for breaking parity hedge scissors.

Didn't think I'd make it out of this level but this was part of that 154 run...

Thanks for the comment, and I'll be curious if you find it interesting enough to play through to the end!

I have been curious about the PlayDate, I have a few friends who have them-- though the higher-res screen (even if it's black and white) and general polish of some games I've seen videos of make me feel like players would expect higher production values from a game than my basic pixel art here... so the art+animation effort might be significant. Have you played any tactical RPG-ish games on it? "Sasquatchers" is one that came up in a search that seems to be in the Advance Wars vein though with a very different theme.

(Also, since this game is inspired by someone else's existing board game, I made it as a labor of love and would never charge or accept donations for it-- but this also means I don't want to devote too much of my life to it :), though clearly I was inspired enough to make a sequel a few years later. I have thought about taking what I learned here to create a new tactical RPG, but there are already so many good games in the world, so it's nice to stick with smaller-scale free-time projects...)

Lovely atmosphere and use of the single-bit constraint, and I also appreciate that it's very short as a game, just enough to convey the mood.

Fun + nostalgic-style game, it gets the adrenaline going, and I like how it's short enough to re(play) in a quick sitting.  Thank you for creating the whole PICO-8 tutorial for it (I've only watched a few episodes so far).

Hi, this is unrelated, but I noticed your link to your github on your main page has a typo (githib.io)

Hi, where are you trying to play it?

The .p8.png file is a "cartridge" file that PICO-8 should be able to load (on your computer, on a raspberry pi / retroarch based arcade setup, or so on).

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I was hoping to make something people could get through in one sitting but wasn't too easy.

hey, thanks, I’m glad to hear that! I need to play through some of the other games now…

Lovely game-- interesting puzzles and use of PICO-8!

My personal high score is 140, and deepest level is 8. See game page for more notes.

Sure, just uploaded it, let me know if you have problems running it.

Thanks, and getting anything working to fit into the character limits is hard! You might be interested-- I revised it and was able to pack smoother motion and a bit more gameplay (multiple enemies) into 560 characters, though I had to remove sound and a few other details.

Thanks! Ah, and now I see a bug in the attractor resizing-- I'll have to figure out if I can fix it within the 5 characters I have left...

Basically, when the attractor is at max size it changes the direction of what the resize button does-- but if you happen to stop resizing exactly at max size, it sits there changing direction back and forth 60 times a second, so you only have a 50/50 chance of hitting the resize button on the right frame to break out of that loop vs. further growing it.

Update: I think this is fixed now. 560/560 characters used.

ditto, elegant use of characters!