sücco's burgeoning blog!

Hello and happy Sunday! Unless it’s an unhappy Sunday, then sorry.

I went to buy pillowcases today at Big Lots. It was really depressing in there so I left quickly. Then I almost got in a crash with this truck who turned widely into my lane. I realized then and there that life is fragile, and I’m better off sleeping on naked pillows. Also that I should probably write on my website sometime.

I think I mentioned it some weeks ago, but I started work on Jeri Tower 2 a while ago. I decided to let the Solar Complex momentum carry me and have been working on it pretty consistently.

My initial goal was to make it Valentine’s Day themed and put it out on Valentine’s Day. And that was like 10 days from when I decided. So that didn’t happen obviously. I got sidetracked implementing a bunch of cool stuff that I’ll show you now!!

No longer cubic

The first thing I did for this project was make Jeri not-so-square-like. I had the idea to do something like this for the first game as a completion reward but I was worried about the space all the graphics would take up so I didn’t bother.

I used my brain this time and used some trickery to get this working while only using 7 graphics tiles!

The heads are their own tiles (four of them) and then the bodies are all crammed into three more tiles.

Jeri’s mouth is secretly always agape with excitement but it’s hidden behind her body in most poses. I hope you remember this important trivia when you play the game.

LEVEL EDITOR!!

After finishing Solar Complex, I returned to this project. I started playing with the idea of making a level editor to make placing enemies less stupid.

You see, in the original game I had 32/128 tiles dedicated to “enemy placement tiles”. Basically, when a level is loaded the game goes through every tile on-screen. If it finds certain tiles, it will erase that tile and place an enemy in some configuration in its place.

See? The orange circle turns into a flame. And the gray one into a shield guy.

This was the easiest way to implement placing enemies, but also very rigid and wasteful. I only have 128 graphics tiles to work with, and I had to spend a quarter of them on what are basically placeholders the player will never see. And I had to pick and choose what enemies could be placed in what directions and all that.

So I decided to make some kind of level editor and store the enemy data in some format of my own choosing. It was just supposed to be enemy placement but I ended up putting in environment editing too. It all got a bit out of hand but it’s pretty damn convenient!

The only problem is that I can’t save the enemy placements directly to the game like I can the environment layout. PICO-8 only lets you store graphics, a tilemap, and sounds in a cartridge, so I had to find a stupid workaround to store my own data. When I press the save button, it copies the enemy data to the clipboard so I can paste it into the code window.

Each enemy is saved as a 4-digit hexadecimal number. The far left digit is the enemy type, then X position, Y position, and facing direction.

The editor definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s got everything I need to make levels efficiently! There may even be a cheat code to access it yourself, if you behave.

TUNES!!

I got OwlBag on the horn when I came up with getting the game done for Valentine’s. He was down to work in that tight window which was so darling of him. We didn’t accomplish that nonsense but our bravery was admirable.

I decided I wasn’t going to do any backtracking shenanigans in this game and just have it be 30 levels long. So I asked OwlBag if he could do three songs for each set of ten levels. And of course he delivered!

Here’s the first of the three songs : D

He did such a good job that there’s even more room for sound effects than there was in the original game (you only have 64 sound effects / chunks of music, it’s crazy). Which I’m very thankful for because there will be new critters and new moves that need new sounds.

Completion Estimate…!

I have some enemies and mechanics from the original game to port over, as well as some new ideas to put to page. It’s all a bit overwhelming but I think things are gonna start falling into place quicker than I expect.

I’m betting it’ll take me 2 weeks at most to finish everything up. And I’ll set a deadline soon so I get my ass moving. I might just keep mum until the game is done as to not spoil all the surprises.

Thank you for reading, I love you reader!!

🐒See you next post!🐒