itch.io

Yeah, there's no substitute for good tactile feedback. One of the reasons I've never been a big mobile game player. Glad you enjoyed it, though!

The little 6 is a single-character substitute for "\^", which is a common control code. Zep didn't necessarily make all the shortcuts like that very obvious. I actually included characters 0-15 in the tool, they're just in the code as comments and you can copy and paste them, since they're not printable in a running program.

Okay, that makes sense. I've been working on a number-based puzzle game and it's so open-ended I don't know how to check if things are solvable, so I've started chipping away at brute-force testing.

Well, I actually don't have a less-minified version, as I usually code my small projects directly in condensed form. I can give you some info on how things work, though. There's a string at the beginning:, ?"⁶1⁶c6⁶!5f10+⬅️5✽●6⌂3", which activates the secret palette colors. Basically, the question mark is a condensed print command, '⁶1⁶c6" replaces the flip() and cls() commands, and "⁶!5f10" functions as a poke command to hex address 5f10. The symbols that follow are the values that colors 0,1,2,3.... are assigned. The bezel is drawn using the reversed shape feature in Pico-8 0.2.6, which is activated here by another poke command in a string. If you haven't, I'd recommend looking up and reading about P8SCII control codes, which can do all kinds of useful things in a small space. Some of the required symbols are tricky to print out, so I made a little tool that makes that part easy, you can find it here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=40525

Nice core mechanics and very slick effects! I did come across a bug, in that I left my paddle in the center and it somehow never missed the ball, it just kept endlessly scoring.

Surprisingly complex mechanics, awesome work. Was going to ask how you tested if all the puzzles were solvable, but looks like you pit a little disclaimer in there.😄

I'll have to dig into this one myself, nice work!

Again, thanks. Glad you're enjoying it. I've had ideas for LCD-themed projects for a while. I've spent time trying to overcome the limits of Pico-8's low resolution to build worlds that seem large and open, so it's neat to see what's possible when going the other direction and depicting something small and close. I'm thinking I might try and simulate a bit of motion blur next time.😉

Thanks=),

I use my little character printer tool.  https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=40525

For most chars, you can just use the dpad and buttons to build strings, though for 0-15 you'll need to copy them from comments in the code.

Well, if you'd like to adjust something, there is an easy way to free up a few characters. After ::_::, print the string ?'⁶1⁶c', this will replace cls() and flip(). Got that one from a tweet by zep.

Plays well, and has probably the most entertaining one-sentence synopsis I've ever read. I think making the hearts a little less scarce would help, but otherwise great job!

Thanks,

I made a tweetcart version of snake some time ago, and I figued this gave me enough room to fancy it up a little. Glad you like it!

Yeah, the dungeon does rely pretty heavily on trial-and-error since there wasn't space for complex mechanics, and storing two copies of one sprite and using tile properties was cheap. The entire map is shown for a frame at startup when it's being drawn, so your cheating isn't entirely unprecedented. Glad you had fun, and thanks for the feedback!

Okay, a fixed version is up. The offending area is now blocked off, though still visible for the sake of intrigue ;). The cave entrance is also slightly repositioned, but still on the same screen.

Cool, glad to hear it! Had to cut out the little victory message and freeze frame I wanted for the end, but hoped things would be clear enough despite that. 

Glad you're enjoying it. You're actually the second person who's written about being confused by my little bug-doubling-as-a-feature. Guess that's what I get for not having any play testers. I'm working on a fix, and I explain what's going on here:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=54435

Also, you mentioned the dungeon, did you figure it out, or were you stuck there?

Thanks,

I might be able to tweak the movement speed, I'll experiment. Just curious, have you found any caves past the first, or the dungeon?

I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was glitched due to a Pico-8 update. It's now  fixed.

Thank you,🙂

I've thought about using fillp() to draw shapes so that only the low bits are used and a simple memcpy() call could transfer the data, but that would cut your horizontal map size in half. As it is, I think my little transfer script is pretty byte-efficient, as it has a lot of redundancy. I actually used the extended map memory, so the entire map (above & below ground) covers 88 in-game screens, with 48 for the overworld, making it 3/8 the size of Hyrule from Zelda 1.

I hope people take the time to play through it, I'm especially proud of the dungeon and I had fun making the map space used to draw the dungeon walls double as a secret underground area itself.😉

I had to submit an incomplete version to meet the deadline, as the map encoder was glitching and I had to work. A fixed version should be up tonight or tomorrow.

I'm flattered, thank you.😊

I'm also amused, as this the first time I've seen a review of a game that's several times the size of said game's entire source code.😄

Excellent job fitting in so many functional mechanics. At first I thought sticking to walls was just a bug, but it's very useful. I've personally never been able to jump well using the up button, so I changed "if(b&4>0" to "if(b>31" to switch it to X and it works great.

Thanks,🙂

I just tried to mimic the style of zep's Jelpi platformer demo.

Thanks,😊

Took a lot of loop tricks to get this one working, but running in a straight line just isn't as fun without some parallax.

Very nice job!

Looks nice, and has an engaging risk/reward system of trying to aim at enemies while avoiding obstacles. I never played the original game, but I can see why it would be popular.

I think user-controllable firing would be a nice addition if you could find a way to squeeze it in, but it works okay as is.

Thanks for the mention, =)

I actually updated the encoders and tutorial with automatic escape-code insertion so you can use up to all 255 chars in your strings, which can let you cram a bit more in.

Thank you,☺️

I spent a while designing the tiles using Pico-8 shape commands, trying to draw everything as efficiently as possible. I put a bit more detail where it was most noticeable (especially the pipes and the ground), and left it out where it wasn't, like the clouds and hills. Between that and colors that are pretty close to the original, it gives a good overall impression, even if a lot of details are missing.

I like the animation, and the game over screen is surprisingly stylish. Some destructible barriers would be nice, but don't know how that would work with the super fast bullet-hell-type design. Feels like these guys just raided the puny earthlings' espresso supply.😋

Great job on this! It looks good, but even more impressively the controls and physics are great, too!

If you have anything more you wanted to add, it does seem like there's a bit of room to cram things further, I looked over it a bit and got the byte count down to 993. ;)

Thanks, ☺️

I actually managed to cut out a few more bytes and added a poke to fix the repeated jumping. I think I have a pretty solid platformer base for any more little projects I do in the future. 🙂

That's cool, I guess I inadvertantly kind of recreated a bug/Easter egg from the original game. Thanks for taking the time and interest to find that. ☺️

The experimentation part does seem a bit daunting. It offers more potential space, but I've gotten so used to cutting down chars it seems I'll have some re-learning to do. Glad we have a month.🙂

Yeah, I recognized my sprite compression code there. Nice thing about that is I can just open a blank cart and replace sset with pset to see the raw sprite data. Beyond that, though, really nice use of color variation, particles, screen distortion, and lighting!

As for suggestions, I just wonder if you'd consider letting the player either eat fish the same size as them, or just pass through them unharmed. It was a bit surprising to find that touching the same size fish kills you.

Wow, those are some nice graphics, very well done!

I guess I've programmed a bunch of little games and tweetcarts in a rather insane manner then, staring directly into the abyss. o_O

On the plus side, if I can do that, I figure I could probably handle doing some coding in assembly if I wanted to learn it.

Glad to hear you finished it, I've been hoping that people would do that. Went back and re-assessed my code, and managed to squeeze in instructions to hold the button to bounce, so hopefully that helps someone avoid frustration in the future.

As for the logo, that's pretty hacky. The characters are actually printed in black to the top left corner of the screen, then that area is scanned left to right top to bottom via a single loop using the floor divide and modulo operators, and the color value is tested for each pixel. For each one, a circfill command is given, but the radius value has the pixel color of that spot subtracted. Since subtracting 12, the number of the background, results in a negative radius value, no circle is drawn for spaces that aren't black. Finally, a blue filled circle is drawn over the printed text to hide it.=) You can see it printed out if you delete the chunk of code that looks like this:

c(0,4,k,12)

Oh, also, in case you hadn't tried it, I thought I'd mention a little easter egg. If you press the directional buttons on the title screen, you can make Squirt do a little dance. It's just an unintentional side effect of reusing his code while restricting movement, but with tweetcart games, you've gotta make bugs into features!

Thank you very much☺️,

This was actually my fist game (well, technically a revision of my first game), and as such I ended up putting quite a bit of time into it, refining and cramming it down to size. Probably overkill, but it taught me a lot. I've had some comments expressing frustration with the controls, as it's designed around holding buttons down to bounce, but there wasn't quite space to explicitly explain that in-game. Hopefully you didn't try playing by just pressing the buttons. Did you play through to the ending?

Wow, if I actually managed to introduce someone to Tetris, that's a really cool thing, glad you liked it. =)

Great job! The compression system is impressive, but I think the visual design really pushes it to the next level. Visual touches like the flowing bubbles and undulating seaweed give the simple graphics a lot of life and personality.🙂

Thanks, I've got a lot to learn myself, I'm just used to trying different approaches to a problem long enough to figure out sneaky workarounds.=)