itch.io

thanks! it has, and we appreciate it. :D

We semi-accidentally started a solo TTRPG book club on the fediverse, and “Princess with a Cursed Sword” was the first game all of us played. It was super super fun to talk about the game and read others’ playthroughs! We had some good conversations with folks about how its mechanics shape the tone of the stories we told. Our own playthrough ended up on the dark end of those we saw, but we had a good time with it.

I think if I understand you, yes - the way a Bitsy game works, you have the initial title text in a box with a blank background, then you play through the part of the game with screens that you move your character through, then you have the epilogue text in a box with a blank background, and then it goes completely blank. When the title comes up again, that’s you back at the beginning again.

Thank you! We’re really proud of how much we got done on as short a time as we had to finish!

Name: Star Courier. Code: 92200

Genre: Arcade Theme: Space Platform: IM-98 Feature: FMV Feelies: Journal

An action game where you dodge asteriods, fire from enemy ships, and more to traverse the space between the stars and deliver your vital packages.

Release Year: 1991

Time to Beat: 13 days. This is definitely from the era where they used difficulty to stretch out playtime - fortunately, we had some friends willing to hang out with us while we streamed playing it and give pep talks.

Notes:

The IM-98 CD-ROM attachment was a late addition in the history of the machine, and opened up space for a few early FMV games to release on the console, like Star Courier. It’s clear that playing video used up almost all the power of the processor, but they got around it by having video windows pop up during breaks in the action. The game is essentially a rail shooter without the shooting - obstacles and enemies are sprites that pop up in front of you, grow, and then fly (hopefully) past you, and you move your ship around the plane of your screen to dodge them. Some objects do move diagonally, and it uses the limited color capacity of the IM-98 to highlight them as they near you. The story is pulpy and the acting is campy, but it’s still a neat experience if you’re willing to die a lot to get through it.

The booklet included with Star Courier is something of a highlight - it’s a fictional research log by a scientist investigating a strange new element. The urgency of the rest of it - and how dramatically your ship explodes when struck - makes a lot more sense if you read this first.

we never read the story but this takes something better from it than most responses we’ve seen and we appreciate that

This was so effective. What a series of events.

glad we could share it!

Oooh, the way you interleaved the percussion in Midnight Oil was super clever - these are great tracks!

New Beginning is so good! And I love the pair of Storytime and Cursed Storytime!

Nice pieces! I think Shadowfall is my fave - it has a cool tense atmosphere!

Really neat rhythms! Thanks for sharing all these!

Love the break in the middle! Delightful piece!

Sorry, belated question: do other PICO devs have permission to use these? The purpose of the jam was to provide free music to devs to put in their carts - if that’s not what you want, it doesn’t belong in the jam.

Cute piece! Very well-chosen title - it does feel like what would play in a town or something.

Oh, belated question: do you know what license you would like to release this under?

I like the choice of accompanying music.

May you get what you deserve and may they get what they deserve.

Thank you for all your work and for keeping us all updated - I definitely would not want to be blindsided by an unexpected change like that, but Medical Aid for Palestine sounds like a good organization to support and I appreciate your getting that organized.

Adventure on the Garden Planet is cool! Haven’t downloaded the others to check them out, but thanks for submitting!

Oooo, cool piece!

Oooh, cool visualizers and tunes!

I’m still stunned that you pulled this off. Good job!

Apologies in advance for deleting your comment; we’re aware that a tokiponist exists who uses our sitelen pona characters to translate a far-right webcomic, but they deserve to rot in obscurity so we shan’t give them any publicity about it.

Good stuff! Solid horror vibes.

Not sure what to use as a cover image? Feel free to ask for help and/or hash out ideas here!

Pro tip: Wikimedia Commons and Flickr both have good tools for filtering search results by language. Taking a photograph, cropping it to a square, and running it through a tool like bikibird’s Depict is a really effective way to get something evocative without a lot of effort.

That was quite fun! Good jam game!

If the educational version works for you, sure! The important part is that your music is in a form that PICO-8 devs can copy into their carts - whatever tools you find comfortable to use for that purpose are fine.

Ooo - just reading this, I immediately love how flipping heads means both good and bad outcomes. Definitely interested to try this!

No worries! Glad to be of service!

A friend linked to this and we’re all talking about giving it a try - thanks for putting this out there!

Small bit of feedback: hollow point bullets are are actually less able to punch through armor than other kinds of bullets, not more. Just poking around on the Internet, there’s a kind of US military armor-piercing ammo that’s referred to as “Black tip”, which might be a cool name? I don’t know, just wanted to point out that hollow point bullets are not armor piercing.

Unrelated to bullets: the Turmoil mechanic is really interesting! That sounds like a really fun dynamic to try to lean into.

I dunno if anyone has any questions about the jam, about music, or about PICO-8, and you can always start your own thread, but here’s an all-purpose thread for asking and answering!

Bug’s still here - I guessed a number that was one off and the game hung.

I like luvrhino’s suggestion, and I think it might actually be possible to get the same effect without special cases, just by capping the search space. By the time you get to (x-500) is a 10th power, the only possible value for x-500 is 1, because the 10th power of 2 is more than three digits - so the search for the highest power that works can always stop at 10. Presumably similar “at this point the answer is unique” cutoffs can apply to other criteria.

Said this elsewhere, but: you can find public-domain, CC-BY, and other royalty-free photos online - sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons have loads of them. You can get higher-quality (print resolution!) images for not much more work, and not be stealing from anyone.

Just came across this today - really interested to keep reading through it, but I noticed an error in the instructions for tying a bowline (p. 16 in the pdf). In the diagram, the loop in the long tail has the end in front of the loop and the short tail coming out in front of where the loop crosses itself … but I think the end of the long tail has to be in the back, or the knot won’t tie.

Currently on page 26 - this is very readable! The lore information feels pretty efficient, we definitely get bogged down in that section in some books.

Typo note: on page 25 it says:

By default, your refresh starts at three and is reduced by one for each stunt after the first three you choose—essentially, your first three stunts are free!

…and on page 26 it says:

If you’re all experienced, and you want to start with more powerful characters, just take all three to start and off you go.

…but just after that it says:

We allow your character up to four stunts before requiring you to spend refresh. This means your character may start with two school stunts and two stunts of their own. (This allows you one more stunt than the standard three stunts of Fate Core.)

I assume the two-school, two-custom is the correct one, and the other parts are copy+paste errors. Might also affect the advice about how many stunts to prepare at the beginning for beginners, but we haven’t gotten to the information about school stunts yet.

we never got to see or participate in those rumors, but that “I wish anything was possible” feeling is very real

it’s impossible to make a game where anything is possible and almost impossible to make a game that can still feel like that after you understand it

we actually straight-up quit playing dragon age origins because we knew, without asking, that it wouldn’t be possible to take the actions we wanted to take, that the story had given us a situation but no GM we could lay out our plans to, and who could understand them and respond

I’m sorry to hear the game became such a source of distress to you. I’m glad you’re in a place where the pain is less. I hope people appreciate it for what it is, and continue to do so.

Long-belated update: I think my 2010 laptop just did not have a modern enough graphics card to run it. I recently upgraded to - *checks notes* - a 2015 computer with a budget 2013 graphics card, and now the game runs wonderfully.

sama!

Just played our first game of this with a couple friends last week! Leaned hard into the kid aspect of it, got completely blindsided by the intensity of feelings when that kid began to realize that oh, right, this person is kinda dead and also literally dying right now. Absolutely spent the ending of the game in tears. It was really really good.