Yessir, MAZE book is a marvel! One day I will draw a nice picture of all levels. There is some kind of inner beauty in an interconnectivity graph of rooms. It is not as random as it may feel when you play the game (albeit, the graph is much smaller than in a paper book).
Yes, totally. Pico-8 is a virtual console (think of Game Boy that doesn't exist in the real world), albeit it mimics the graphical/sound capabilities of 8-bit systems. Lua is a programming language (kind of lightweight C++ that is stripped down to a bare minimum set of operations). Lua is also a dynamically typed & interpreted language, so in comparison to C++, one doesn't have to compile the application to run it.
Example:
local name = "oneearedrabbit"
local welcome = "Hello, " .. name .. "!"
for i = 1, 10 do
print(welcome)
end
-- this is a comment, and I think you can guess at this point what this tiny program does
Pico-8 doesn't have lots of batteries under the belt like in SFML/SDL2. For instance, you can change a pixel on the screen with a function call `pset(x, y, color)` or draw a line `line(x1, y1, x2, y2)`. There are a few more primitives that you can work with, and it does echo game development in the 80s/90s. It doesn't have shaders or anything complex. A developer has to be very cautious about those limitations, i.e. shall I focus on the game idea or invest more time making it more appealing visually.
To your question, "why?" -- limitations is a great part of the deal. Embrace them. Focus only on what's relevant for you and your game. Cut your game out if it gets too big and messy. And ultimately ship it.
I changed viewport dimensions to 950x650px on itch, I wonder does it look better now? It also could be an issue in my local config when I exported a Pico-8 cartridge to HTML. If it doesn't help, could you post a screenshot, I will troubleshoot.
Excellent! It does ring the bell for me. In one of the versions that I dismissed, I made monsters a bit more practical, e.g. if you jump on a ghost, you can reach a ladder and climb to the next room. Also, bats in this context are pretty useless except for a visual flashlight effect (and killing a player, oh). I will sleep a night on this, but I agree that it would be fun to solve some real puzzles.
Music is on the way, I just ported a little classic masterpiece:
That is solid feedback! I need to redo these texts, i.e. my intent was to give some sort of a clue which door to choose, which I admit doesn't work at all in the current version, and I am sorry about that! I will think about visual clues too. I agree that it is no fun to guess every single door until you find the right one.
Also, a good point about keys; I think they don't add much to the game and unnecessarily make the labyrinth more difficult than I wanted. It should have been a relaxed run that takes no more than 5-10 mins. (There are two closed doors: one is at the entrance and the second one is hidden somewhere :-)
I will fix the aspect ratio shortly. I overlooked the issue.
