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Gave me Space Quest I vibes in the best way. Love the atmosphere, the voice acting was fabulous and all around such a  fun adventure.

Haha, thanks, appreciate you playing!

This is just ridiculously good, especially within the limits of the jam!

I had much better collision detection in here, but it put me over the limit, so just imagine that the all-seeing eye's beam is much wider than it appears  :).

Thanks for playing! I think from comments here plus some other playtesting folks have done, this might be too hard. The creatures are pretty relentless once you're in their field of awareness, but I think a bigger problem is that they can respawn pretty close to you after killing you once, which I thought I had fixed, but perhaps not. That especially hurts if it happens when you have all the treasure, because you suddenly lose two and have to go search the house for them again. Perhaps I'll give it some tweaks and post an update to the BBS in the future.

EDIT: The enemies actually also constantly move, so there's no real way to predict where they'll be. They either shamble around randomly if they don't see you or follow a path to you if they do, and they recheck their field of vision pretty frequently.

EDIT: I am a complete buffoon - I never even checked democart for SFX/music! So never mind about that whole SFX/music comment. Maybe what you can include next time is a cart full of brain cells for me :).

Oh weird! I wonder if I forgot to regrab stuff at the beginning. My copy of start cart 1 didn't have any SFX or music, only sprites.

I enjoyed the creative spark of having to use only provided assets and using things in ways they probably weren't intended to be used :). I didn't settle on the idea of doing Haunted House until I saw the bat sprite in motion, then I started building the house out of different sets of terrain blocks, wanting the floors to be different from one another since the Atari version uses different colors. After that, it was picking out things to use as the player, treasure, stairwells, the front door. Haunted House didn't have an in-game antagonist, but it came with a booklet that had a story, so I went with the large animated skull and had his animated mouth tell the story instead of bite or attack. Probably if I was creating my own art, it would have looked a lot different, but would the game even exist if that bat didn't kickstart my thought process? 

The one thing I found myself wishing I had more of was sfx/music options (I didn't solve the puzzle to unlock the additional assets, so I may have missed some). I think it was just the mood of my game didn't fit with most of the provided sounds. I ended up using the game over sound on my start screen because it was the "spookiest" one :).

@TobyThePoser Thanks for giving this a go!

Haunted House on the Atari had 9 difficulty levels - this remake is based on the hardest one. The Atari version had some differences that I think made it harder than this. One was that you could only carry one thing at a time, so you were either carrying the key or treasure, but not both (in the Atari version, it was one treasure with 3 pieces you had to assemble). The doors also didn't stay unlocked once you unlocked them, so if you didn't have the key, it was pretty easy to get lost finding the open path out. And while I think that my monsters move faster, the ones in the Atari were pretty relentless, blew the match out from farther away, and wouldn't let you relight it in their presence. I tried to balance making it challenging with making it possible to escape. Even in my play testing though, I did die a few times, mostly when the random monster respawns after dying were fairly close to my location and made it hard to escape.

I crossed the finish line! I'm sure there are things I can clean up, but I wasn't sure how much time I'd have over the weekend, and eventually you just have to let the baby crawl :). This jam has been a blast, I've had fun thinking of different ways to interpret the sprites and make something I hope is fun for more than just me :).

@Terrapinreligion There's no built-in function in PICO-8, but there's a basic box collision function in the democart included in the assets for the jam, so maybe that'll fit your needs?

With more days than I expected left, I'm down to just a couple of nagging bugs that feel quickly solvable (I should never say that out loud). Fiends can now catch you, blow out your match when they get close, steal your key & treasure and the "homeowner" flies in to mock you when you die :). They don't always come right for you, which makes it possible to avoid them, but it's hard when you're bumping into walls in the dark!

Well, the game is finished, in that it's runnable, playable, winnable and losable :). Tomorrow is adding music/sfx, the final gameplay logic (fiends stealing items when they catch you), maybe a little juiciness/flair and the ever-popular number tweaking.

Here's the current start screen - I built the spooky house you're trying to escape out of some of the sprites!

Lighting is a go now! Enemies are invisible until they get within a certain distance of you (static here, but they'll usually be chasing you), the startup option to make the match not flicker for those for whom it can trigger seizures is done (enabled here), and the UI showing how many matches & lives you have left, what floor you're on, and how many of the pieces of treasure you collected is in. Start screen & story intro also done (not shown here).

TODO: treasure, win & lose scenarios, death, music/sfx, and some tightening of my a* pathfinding for the diabolical denizens of the house. I feel pretty confident about finishing now!

Thanks! I did find that, but also ran across a very compact version on the BBS that does precisely what I need. It's the "circle map" function here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=38881 in case anyone else is looking for something similar.

I integrated this into the game and it works great. So that's off the list, as well as the start screen. At this point I feel like the stuff that's left is very doable in the remaining time :)

I've made a lot less progress than I'd like (thanks, life), but I still have a sliver of optimism that I can finish my Atari 2600 Haunted House remake in time.

Still to do: scoring, enemy logic, music, sfx, start screen.

Still to do pie in the sky edition: In the Atari version, the walls and items are invisible unless you have a lit match in the vicinity. But do I have the time/skill to implement a working map/object lighting system? Questionable!

Thank you!

Thanks! The backspace button was my compromise for my collision detection not being great :).