Fitting, I am working on a game where you can eat enemies after beating them to recover life, and playing this game makes me realize I should care about a few things…
In particular, at the beginning you just got much more life that you need, then quickly you meet a dense group of enemies and this time you don’t have time to kill and eat them to recover; and you cannot capitalize on the first enemies as they are too far away. There are a few places where you can capitalize though, but you need platforms to be able to jump above the food to eat it later when in danger. Since the jump is very vertical and the laser only makes you hover without moving horizontally, it’s very difficult to jump above food. Hovering does work to let skeletons pass under you though, but food doesn’t move so you cannot use this technique.
In level 2, I exploited the fact that enemies spawn when in view, but do not despawn, to attack them from the left side after spawning them, from a safe place. Further in the level I noticed that my shot range was shorter than their shot range though, so it didn’t work well against enemies shooting horizontally and with few platforms around, such as the 3 shooting plants vertically aligned before the boss’s area.
Against level 2 boss, I realised there was no limit going back so I lure him toward the beginning of the level. But as soon as I reached the area with the former 3 plants, he fell through the floor, attacking me from below the floor first, then starting a seemingly infinite fall at an increasing speed. Due to fixed point number wrapping in PICO-8, he started falling from above and again on the ground, faster and faster, and I could see it appear in a flash, for a frame, sometimes spawning skeletons from above and the skeletons would also fall super fast onto me. Eventually, the boss, landed on the floor again (statistically its position Y just reached the right value I guess), then it fell again as I was still on the left part of the level.
After a moment it landed again and this time I made sure to stay on the right, but with the lack of platform it was harder to fight and I died.
I have a nice video but it’s too big for itch.io. Maybe if I post it on YouTube I can embed the link here.