sücco's burgeoning blog!

A negative developer’s log? What a novel concept!

As you may be able to tell, I didn’t write nothin’ while I was working on Solar Complex. I had to work hard to get all my school obligations done while finishing the game in a week. I was even working on it on my birthday! Which was the 2nd. The groundhog did not deliver.

I made the game for this year’s Bigmode Game Jam, which had the theme of “Power”. In this exciting new post on succojones.net, I will spill all the beans on how the game came to be!!

Verbing it.

The theme “Power” obviously has a lot of ways it can be taken. Power is a very common variable in video games. Attack power and all that. I thought back to this interview with Satoshi Tajiri on Game Center CX where he brings up the idea of designing a game around a verb.

I think this clip is a bit cut down, I implore you to seek out this show if you can. They do a lot of great interviews and there are fansubs for almost every episode.

So I wanted to design a game around powering. I got to thinking about powering little machines that do this or that or fight enemies or something. That logic is just a bit too complicated for a short jam though. Eventually I figured out the idea of lighting panels! Here’s some doodles I did in class trying to figure things out.

The idea of enclosing unlit tiles with lit tiles to light them was inspired by the Blue Sphere minigame from Sonic 3, where you touch numerous balls. The only problem was I didn’t know how the hell to program it. But lemmie tell ya, I figured it out!

The figured out:

First, go through every tile on screen. It’ s PICO-8, so there’s 256 tiles on screen. Not the most optimal tactic I’m sure, but y’know. If we find an unlit panel that is touching anything that isn’t a panel (meaning it definitely isn’t enclosed by lit panels), then we flood fill from it, marking all unlit panels it’s connected to as not enclosed.

Then we loop through every tile again. Any unlit panel that’s not enclosed will be marked as such, and any unlit panel that is enclosed will have been left alone. Therefore, any unlit panel remaining will be be lit, give points, and kill any enemies on top of it!

Twas very satisfying to figure this out. Har har har…

That was the big learning moment of the project. The rest of it was just programming the player’s movement, enemies, game loop crap, score, timer, setting up the level layouts… it’s actually a lot but I’m pretty familiar with doing all that so it was just a time synch.

The rest of it

I actually ended up using the Tiled tilemap editor to layout the levels this time around. I love PICO-8, but the tiny window is a pain in the ass. You can’t even see a whole screen at once. I was very thankful for this Tiled plugin by Sam. Thank you, Sam!

The only fellow I’d like to thank more than Sam is the eloquent OwlBag, who composed the game’s wonderful song. When I released Jeri Tower it had no music, and barely anyone played it. OwlBag is a very smart fellow and he was able to make a killer 3-act OST for the game (using PICO-8’s weird little tracker tools btw, not exactly normal composing fair).

Just having music makes a game so much more engaging to play. It can really make or break things. I’m very thankful for OwlBag’s wonderful contributions. YAY!

Soon enough I’ll be done with the PICO-8 nonsense and he’ll get to compose without any restraints. You won’t know what hit you!!

Closing thoughts on le game

I think this one came out good! It felt great to get a game out after so long, and I think everything came together very well. Graphics are pretty, the tune is wonderful, gameplay is pretty neat. I’ve gotten some criticism for the scoring / time system not being perfect, but I’m about done working on this game forever. I’d love to come back and do a sequel without PICO-8 constraints, and it’ll be the best damn arcade game ever! Probably.

Here’s the link in case you haven’t played it yet!

Thanks for sticking around everyone. The next game will come sooner that you know! Be ready…

🐒See you next post!🐒