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Well now I want to make Space Invaders with a Tapper skin.

…or vice versa?

This was such a good time. I'm really happy to be part of this.

Looked forward to next year!

I don't even know what to say about what this holiday has been like, but that's not the point of this update. The point is I have submitted my game!

I updated the title, named it "JaunTender". Now it makes me think I should've put a Philly spin on the game.

And I updated the player sprite and gave it some animation. I'm oddly charmed by how it looks like you're doing a little pee-pee dance. But most of all I'm proud of the little bit of hair that doesn't move.

That's all for now. It's been a ride.

Final stats:

• 73 commits
• 3915 tokens (48%)
• 19813 chars (30%)
• 5906 compressed (38%)

Coming up to the holiday has been a really busy time, but I've gotten to squeeze in some little bits here and there. And right now I'm getting to stay up late to greet visiting family before we all get to go to bed. So what's better than a devlog update?

I finally got my wife to listen to the music. She… does not like it. That is, she thinks I did a good job with what I'm going for — discordant and creepy — but she doesn't want to listen to more of it. Of course, she has perfect pitch. And I made some heavy use of the "detune" effect, on top of other choices I made.

I also did some graphics work, finally. Not really huge changes, but some nice updates to the pod sprite and the … I don't have a name for this, but I guess "pod entry zone".

Old pod:

New pod:

Old "pod entry zones" (active, inactive):

New "pod entry zones" (active, inactive):

And I've had some fun with more animations, like the pod entry zone filling up when a lane is activating. 

The commit where I added that ended with

 Woo palette swaps and clipping! I'm a big boy now!

Stats:

• 66 commits
• 3764 tokens (46%)
• 19083 chars (29%)
• 5701 compressed  (37%)

I haven't done enough PICO-8 to have enough of a sense of how I really feel about tokens. It's part of the whole constraint philosophy, and I do appreciate that you can name things a bit better because you're not totally constrained only on characters (although I do find myself using a lot of short and semi-cryptic variable names). But some of the things that take up tokens just go against a lot of how I personally feel about good code.

Like you pointed out, getting rid of objects and dumping things in the global namespace can save tokens, and sometimes a lot of tokens depending on how much you repeat. But ugggghhhhhh.

Now that's a happy little accident!

I've been having a fun time learning about the sfx and music, including finally putting together how they work like the sprites and map. That is, just like you make sprites and then place them for the map, you make sfx and then put them together for music.

Gruber's Pico-8 music tutorials have been super helpful as well. And some readings on NerdyTeachers (practical looping, music loops).

All of this has made this time actually fun, even in retrospect — because a lot of it didn't feel fun at the time. More like "frustrating and confusing". But you know what makes things easier? Even though I know music theory and I've played instruments in the past, I've told myself the spooky tenor of the game means dissonance and off-kilter things are just fine (or even desired), and I don't have to spend even more effort and brain space on composition in a proper key. Just… let me save it for a future project.

I'm telling myself to wait on a future project to play with Music Corruptor, too, but… Well, I think I'm good with the intro music, but the loss screen needs some serious work. And maybe some well-placed `POKE`s will do it?

Even though the work has been basically all sound, this devlog still gets images! Hold on to your hats!

We've got music patterns, we've got loops. We've got images of unequal sizes and I'm too tired to fix that.

As you can see, I reserved the beginning of the sfx so I could make sfx instruments if I want. I'm learning about what areas to use and what to reserve. And maybe I should be thinking in groups of 8 instead of 10. That should be simple for me — I am a swing dancer and jazz lover, after all.

In the midst of all this, I took a quick aside to improve player position detection with a bounding box as opposed to just "what's the center pixel of this sprite?"

Also, I messed with some other ways to control looping sounds. I give you stat(46+ch).

Some highlights from recent commit messages:

 It's a hack, like so much else I'm doing.

This is a welcome distraction from trying to figure out music and sounds.

 Maybe this is just more complexity. I mean, it definitely is. But eh, here we are

Stats:

• 59 commits
• 3553 tokens (43%)
• 18022 chars (27%)
• 5416 compressed (35%)

Lots of things can go in a mug. It doesn't have to be a liquid.

If you show those corn having children, I may have to report your content.

Have you considered getting a new mug?

With everything that's been going on in life, I've still carved out some time to work on this. Really, I'm not sure what to do with Astroneer right now, so that's less of a draw away.

I've also been watching this playlist of making a roguelike by LazyDevs (Porklike) in the background. It's interesting to see how different people do things, especially with different experience.

As I said last time, I think gameplay is pretty much done, so my focus now is on graphics and sound. And I said it would be graphics and then sound, but turns out it's sound first! Pretty much the entire graphics work I've done is on the loss screen, which I'm keeping to myself for now. That means a devlog with no GIFs! Deal with it!

I'm really not sure what I'm doing with the sound — that is, what effects I want, or even how to get there. I've found some useful readings on NerdyTeachers, including a link to this Wave Designer cart. Another thing I'm wrestling with is when the update/draw loop is very helpful and when it's not. For instance, if you want a looping sound, you need to also work on some hysteresis or edge detection (this Factorio combinator cookbook is helpful to read if those terms aren't familiar to you). And then what about ending the loop?

Well, SFX takes a sound and a channel. You can stop sound or end a loop by using a negative number as the sound. As that commit message said:

That means we need to know which channel, and hey there are four lanes and four channels. I can't see a problem with this at all.

Stats:

• 46 commits
• 3270 tokens
• 16417 chars
• 4946 compressed

Holy crap yes it was.

I distinctly remember that pink square and the δ for the gas canisters.

I've had some more chunks of time where I can work on this — really because I can't do much of anything else, like stuck in waiting rooms with no/bad internet. It's been quite the month so far. But the good part of all that nonsense is that I may be done with gameplay? Or doing really well for now. There's time in the month to see what comes to me later.

There's been a lot a lot of tweaking, pushing at animations, movement speed, getting things to line up and/or purposefully be offset. But I ended up with this title/menu screen.

I was also thinking of how a player would even know what to do and what this game is about. Sure, I have a sweet lore "splash screen", but what then? So I spent a lot of work on making an instruction/tutorial thing.

The things I did to pause pod countdown were just weird and funky. Not like NPC train hat funky, but I'm starting to understand how things like that happen.

Now, I really, really should concentrate on the graphics. That could easily take me the rest of the month. And then sound?

Stats:

• 43 commits
• 3009 tokens
• 15062 chars
• 4502 compressed

Also! This reminded me of a game I used to love as a kid. It was some kind of weird arson/heist game where you were going through several floors of a building, trailing a fuse behind you. And there were some gas canisters or something, which you could open and let the gas spread or just let the fuse go by them so they exploded.

I mean, this was a long time ago. Graphics weren't good. You had to use a lot of imagination.

Huh, is https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000460/Arsonist/ an updated version of this?

I will let Charlie burn down the entire house while watching and waiting for her to hit the corner.

Eventual consistency — it's not just for distributed systems anymore.

Yeah, it's not bad! Of course, I really didn't need to do it. I could just draw one sprite on top of another. But it's still a neat trick, and what's not to like about doing more math?

I'm pretty sure you can work "fall through the floor" and "float away randomly" into some Stephen King reference.

Note: I wrote this last night and then completely forgot to hit post. Silly me.

It's been a bit of a week, but I managed to get some stuff done here. Some of that was just letting it stew, just noodling over it while I was doing other things. For example, part of the busy-ness of this week was we got a puppy (yay!), and today was a four-hour round-trip to go pick her up. That was lots of time to think about stuff, including an idea for the title screen.

As I mentioned before, I wanted to work on menu / splash screen / instructions. It was a nice break from working on the gameplay, which is at a good-enough spot to just play it and see how it feels. But it's no good to just jump directly into the game. You need to be drawn in.

I worked out a whole state system, and set up different states like "menu" and "splash" and "game" and "loss". And I re-read the story to remind myself of helpful details.

I also did a good chunk of playing with animation ideas. The constraints of PICO-8 are truly wonderful, and I really enjoyed figuring out how to get some good effects with drawing the same sprites in different places, and the trick of using a non-integer value for the width argument to SPR.

Also playing with fill patterns. This Fill Pattern Catalogue was incredibly helpful.

Still plenty more graphics stuff to do, but hey, there's lots of time left in the month.

Stats:

• 32 commits
• 1593 tokens
• 8145 chars
• 2696 compressed

You can just paste the link into the editor and it'll show the image.

Also, y'all are doing impressive things with graphics. I'm going to see where I get to.

If you want a picture of the future of this game, imagine your character stepping on a designated area — forever.

Okay, got a little bit of time and poked at this some more. One very interesting thing with PICO-8 constraints and my style is that I tend to do a lot of stuff manually, like in the previous GIF the pods are created when I press ❎, and marked as okay when I press 🅾️. Those are the buttons! That's it! What if I want to do more stuff? Well, I guess there's fancy stuff I can do with key presses, but I can also embrace the constraints. The pods will come in automatically, so why not work on that?

I also played with not all of the lanes active at the start, and activating over time. (Hey, and now that I have a button freed up I can use that to activate lanes manually).

Also, now instead of being on the pod itself to mark it, you need to be on the "pad" next to it. I added a nice indicator of when you're in the right place, and it also acts as another indicator of the lane being inactive (since it doesn't "light up").

There's a lot of graphics work to do, but I think next will be menu / splash screen / instructions.

Stats:

• 18 commits
• 851 tokens
• 3712 chars
• 1412 compressed

I got more done than I expected this weekend, especially because I was also spending time playing Astroneer.

Here's what it looks like right now:

In classic Yossef fashion, first step is "make it work" and some later step is "make it look good… maybe?" Art is going to be a whole thing to do.

I very quickly moved out of PICO-8's editor and into an external one. I just can't edit like that, y'know? Although the editor was very helpful when it came to finding the correct glyphs for the button presses and such. Did you know that shift-L actually does ⬅️ and that's not just the PICO-8 font glyph for capital L? That was a fun debugging.

I also enjoyed using sprite flags — instead of tracking sprite numbers for behavior, use those flags!

Stats:

• 14 commits (yes of course I'm tracking this in a git repo)
• 662 tokens
• 2637 chars
• 1092 compressed

Hey everyone! I worked with Casey and he kept talking about PICO-8 and this wacky jam. This year I decided to join in. We'll see how this silly idea works, given I have a baby that's about to turn one year old(!) and on top of that we (uh, I along with my wife, not the baby) decided to take in an exchange student for this school year.  We've got it all: 1-year-old daughter, 16-year-old daughter, confusion abounding. Free time? What's that?

ANYWAY, what's the plan?

My King inspiration is "The Jaunt" (Wikipedia, Internet Archive). And a classic game that sprang to mind is Tapper. There might be some sort of timer stuff brought in from Mini Metro or similar.

I'm not a game developer, but I am a professional programmer — of web apps, mostly doing API and database stuff. But I have toyed with various things on the side, and like playing with stuff like p5.js. I also play programming games on the side, like Zachtronics things, and The Farmer Was Replaced. That's just my jam?

So… let's see where the month takes us!