sücco's burgeoning blog!

(Originally posted January 2024)

The new game is shaping up!
I came up with the idea for it as the final project for my Game Programming class at college. Unfortunately, it was one of the worst classes I’ve ever taken!

After a semester of fumbling around with SDL, the codebase that we built up and were expected to work from was 3000+ lines in one file of intertwining unorganized functions and variables. Every object spawned was hardcoded at every step from creation to drawing. It was an absolute nightmare, and I feel really bad for all of the other students who had never made a game before. If that was my first game making experience I’d never try it again.

Since the project we were building off of was a maze “game”, my idea was traversing a maze with Top-down movement, and then once you get to the end, you have to get back to the start with platformer movement. Enemies will kill you if touched, but if you’re in “platformer mode”, you can jump on them to kill them.

A big inspiration was “The World’s Hardest Game”, an old flash game where you precisely dodge obstacles and such.

If I threw out everything, started from scratch, and worked tirelessly to the due date I could’ve seen it through, but I didn’t see the effort as worth it for such a lousy class. Now I’m feeling much more positive about programming 🙂

These past two days I’ve been working away at the basics and have them working pretty well:

There’s some tweaking to be done, more enemies to add, and then it’s all level design from there. I only have 30 screens in PICO-8, so the plan is to play through a number of levels as red, then play through them backwards as blue, and then use the rest of the levels to play with mid-level switching and other mechanics. That would be about 45 levels.

After all the gameplay stuff I suspect I’ll have plenty of room to code visual polish and maybe a fun ending, which at the same time is what I’m most uncertain about coding funnily enough.

But anyways, I’m gonna take it easy this fine Saturday. Next time I’ll probably go into the limitations and such of PICO-8 and show how some things work behind the scenes.

🐒See you next post!🐒