PIG SSJ 2025 - Puzzle Launch!

Well - put some work in tonight to polish this a bit more and fix most of the bugs as well as add the purchase mechanic for some bomb and clearing powerups.

This was fairly straight forward, but I feel like there were more efficient ways for me to do this, but I'm still happy with it.

Coded this mostly in PICO-8 and used Notepad++ for a lot. Didn't jump into aesprite at all for this and kept everything in the PICO-8 interface since it was all fairly elementary and simple sprites.

PICO-8 has been easy to pickup for the basics, but does feel like playing on hard mode for some things - I suppose like any language.

I wanted to balance a bit better, and I didn't really put a final victory condition in, but I think it's still enjoyable. Play until you get the game over and try for the highest score!

Baby mode is mostly for debug, and its almost impossible to get a game over on, so play on a higher difficulty.

To do For posterity and my own accountability:

Gameplay and UI

Victory Condition?

• Set Score to meet/beat?
• Set number of balls in the hopper to survive?
• True endless?

• BG Music for title/gameplay

Bugfixes

• Double check wildcard ball code/logic. Still seems it triggers on any 3 balls, not 2-of-a-kind + wildcard (Treat this as a feature, not a bug)
• Seems occasionally some explosion sprites display a little off left/right where they should. Need to check that.

Future Releases if I keep at it:

In additional to fixing/implementing some of the above. I would like to:

• Add a true puzzle mode with pre-programmed puzzles and set balls in the hopper to solve - also helps explain gameplay as kinda like tutorial levels
• More clear victory conditions
• Implement a "two screen" UI where the top "screen" is the pachinko pegs, and the bottom screen is the basins - which would allow for much larger basins and more interesting gameplay.
• Add diagonal matching logic (currently only vertical/horizontal)