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I really wanted to participate in this last year, but could not in the end, so this year it is! issue though that I had done 2 jams before this back to back so I need something quite easy to ease off a bit from the constant development! With Druid Dash for MossyMonth and Kumatori Panic! for AGBIC I had my fair share of development in the last couple of months!
Our theme selection is quite long: Catch ‘Em All, Invasion, Opposite Day, Cooperation, Glitch In The Matrix, Wildfire, Recursive, Creation Story, But Does It Float?, Hidden In Plain Sight. You can choose any number of them to feature so this year I assume we will get quite a range of games.
My first thought was on Wildfire, with already doing 2 games handling tiles and movement along them I was playing with the idea of a little puzzle game about a firefighter extinguishing flames with variously shaped hoses and fixed steps/water amounts.
In the end I was not really happy with anything that came after this, so I went back to the drawing board. Quite literally, I opened Aseprite and started to dot down something. Saw a few castle arts and I was inspired to do an invasion themed game, somewhat similar in hardness and cruelty as “’Til Gods Devour Us” (featured in Pico-View June by yours truly)
I myself was quite happy with the looks and the interwebs seemed to agree, so hey, we got a project on our hands! I jumped into PICO-8 and quickly bought the art to see an initial look!
To make it even better I mocked up the defender positions and the upgrading of the castle and we got an almost complete mockup Inside the game! Defender positions are stored inside a table as (x,y) pairs and the units only store the index of their position, so I only need to index said table every time I need a position for a certain unit!
After this came a quick state machine mockup, to have a menu scene and one for the game! This is the point where the initial name, Siege of Muldyr came up, and we are kinda sticking with that one, but I’m jumping a bit ahead. The state machine is the usual state variable storing which we are in, and the various update calls for the states branching from the main PICO-8 update and draw.
At this point I realized I’m not happy with the default font size as they took quite a large space away. With wanting a build and management menu, this is an issue, so I went ahead and made a custom font set for PICO-8.
This tool handles everything after you create the fonts by hand, you only need to poke(0x5f58,0x81) which will tell PICO-8 to always use the custom font and paste in the generated font code! This is the perfect place to also tell you how to do 64x64 inside PICO-8. This is really easy as we have a custom poke() for this as well! poke(0x5f2c,3) will trigger a mode where only the (0,0) -> (64,64) area is rendered on the screen, scaled up! With all that, here is the new font!
The only issue with this is readability, which is the reason it might be due to a modification as lot of people told me that certain letters are hard to read.
With the font and resolution tackled, time to actually create enemies and units for combat! At the moment it is handled in the following way. Each unit has a range variable in which they can attack enemies. If one is in, they select it as a target, and attack it with cooldowns as long as they are in range. If killed or out of range they empty their target variable and start searching for another!
Now I need to balance and introduce ranged units … So instead I remade the title screen and created a little logo for the game, as I was interested in only calling it Siege! We will see about that though. But I do really like the big logo and the small sub-title. Let me know what you think!
