Version 1.1

TL,DR: We’ve posted a new version of the game with a bunch of fixes, features, and improvements all around. The changelog is towards the bottom of the post.

Funny story, though! (mild spoilers ahead, so maybe don’t read if you haven’t played the game at all yet)

We submitted our final release of Stand Elsewhere on Saturday night, about 6 minutes before the PiCoSteveMo jam deadline. Some early players reported that it felt too difficult to “win” the game. Frankly, we’ve never been concerned too much about whether players win or lose; much like life, the journey is more important than the destination, and the real treasure are the leeches you pluck from your dingaling along the way. But we were more than happy to rebalance things a bit.

I fired up PICO-8 and tried to decrease the rate at which the player consumes food and water, which literally involves changing one number in the code from a 60 to a 75. Suddenly, the game no longer built; PICO-8 reported that we were over the compressed code size limit (15360 bytes). I was amazed – I had no idea we were riding that close to the edge in our release build! But I went hunting for some strings to shorten, some bytes to save, that sort of thing.

And then I had a hunch. Some context: we are, of course, using shrinko8 to minify our cart and cram in more code. shrinko8 can operate in “safe” mode, and “full” mode; the latter is more aggressive, results in even smaller code, but makes some potentially dangerous assumptions about your Lua code which can introduce bugs in the minified output. I had accepted these limitations, and thought I’d configured our build script to use full minification mode. But it turns out, nope! We’ve been minifying safely this whole time. I switched to full mode (-m instead of -M – you can see how I might have reasonably mixed them up!) and suddenly we had 700 bytes of headroom to play with!

One of the main goals of this project was to see how much data we could cram into a single PICO-8 cart, so there’s no way we can just leave all that empty space in there. After a couple frantic days of pulling features and fixes off the cutting-room floor, I’m proud to report that we are once again back to a completely 100% full cart – 15360 bytes of compressed code, 17152 bytes of compressed data. Please enjoy Stand Elsewhere 1.1, with the following changes:

• Balance changes. Food and water are consumed more slowly, the kids walk faster, and their goal is closer. Overall, the game should be easier now.
• Fixed bug where you could occasionally hold >100 units of food.
• Added “Endless Hike” mode – no goals, no distractions, no time pressure; just relax, listen to some tunes, and enjoy the scenery!
• New song: “Let The Good Times Roll”. Every song in the movie soundtrack is now available in-game.
• Bridge minigame polish: clearer victory condition, clearer directions, new sprites, more sound effects.
• Fix bug where music would occasionally not start correctly at the beginning of a new game.
• Fixed humiliating persistent misunderstanding regarding the physical layout of train tracks. (Thanks Juho!). In my defense, I live in Los Angeles, and we have only a fleeting familiarity with mass transit.
• Fixed the night sky being disappointingly empty
• In-game credits now include the original musicians, not just the amazing chiptune artists. Please don’t sue us, Zombie Buddy Holly!