Hi!
So I just got back from my week-end at Picoscope 2016 in Nantes and it was great and it is the reason why this post is one day late. But more on that at the end of this post!
Let’s start with the results for my LD35 entry Figurophrenia!!
Figurophrenia is a LD compo game inspired by Hotline Miami in which you control a guy who has a shape shaped head and you have to change the shape of its head to fight similarly shaped enemies. The idea is that the head shapes represent the different personalities of the character and the enemies represent the character’s personal problems for which he actually needs to change his personality.
I want to say that while I’m actually quite proud of how the gameplay turned out, the concept is my vision of schizophrenia and nothing else. I do not consider myself as schizophrenic at all and I did not document myself on schizophrenia for that game and I do think I should have.
Very quickly, here are a few things I regret about this game: I did not take the time to make music, starting over the story mode is hardly attractive at all as the design of it isn’t that interesting, the game’s visuals are poor, the overall presentation could be much improved, I should not have said the game is Hotline-Miami inspired because I feel like that partly killed my “innovation” score.
People also complained about the crosshair being not obvious enough, about the scroll-wheel control being too sensible and confusing and about the almost-constant screenshake being a bit annoying.
On the bright side, people seemed to have fun with the game anyway which is good and I did end up in the top 150 which is not bad at all!
After that I worked on a presentation on tips for game-feel and overall presentation in Pico-8 games for Picoscope! The presentation went pretty well and a video of it should be uploaded by Picoscope’s organizer very soon. No doubt I will learn a lot of thing about the wrongness of my presenting by watching it back! I will link the presentation’s video in the next blog post but it is in french. I will make it again in English though and it will probably be even better than the original!
Here is a little preview: in the presentation, we start from this…
…and we end up with this!
But more about Picoscope later!
Here is a bunch of cellular automata I made this week!
First, I tried making cellular automatas contained in circles!
Then I thought, let’s make it a whole lot of small circles and have them on a grid which would be controlled by a different cellular automata!
And then I just made my cellular automata render lines!
At some point I will make a huge gallery of cellular automatas but that point is not now!
DEEPDOWN mainly had underground progress done this week. I finally sat down and started documenting my ideas for the game and describing what I want to do with it! I also started to think out organization for the sprites, the level generation and general content, both in the game and in the cartridge! Right now, it looks like the game will actually use 32 tilesets!!! Hell yeah!!
I also tried out an effect that I’m keeping. The enemies now drop points which float around and are automatically absorbed by the player!
And then Picoscope happened! We were about a dozen, so it was a very little event indeed but also very convivial and super nice overall! Hopefully, more people will come for next year’s edition!
What happened is that the organizer JM Quere and my very self presented Pico-8 to mostly Pico-8 strangers and made them do things with it. The first day, we presented the basics in a very freestyle way and the second day I did my prepared presentation mentioned earlier in this post and the afternoon, I organized a spontaneous procedural generation workshop in which we made a very flawed flower generator!
The flower generator will get a bit more work on my part and there will be more about it in the next blog post! Maybe I’ll do a small gallery with it, who knows!
During Picoscope, I met very cool people! One of them is a very shy yet very talented musician and you can listen to some of his stuff here!!
During the event I started making CHOMP, a game about eating little yellow balls and fruits very fast! I will finish it in the next few days!! My goal is to make it the chompiest game!
Here is a thought of the organizer JM Quere (twitter here) shared for this blog:
“Vivement la prochaine édition où le l’on se retrouvera tous avec nos PocketCHIPs dans la même ambiance !!! Et merci pour tes interventions : )”
Which translates to:
“Can’t wait for the next edition, when we will all find ourselves with our pocketCHIPS in the same ambiance!!! And thanks for your interventions : )”
No problem JM, it was my pleasure!!!
This week was good!! Next one, I’m finishing CHOMP, polishing the flower generator and doing a lot more underground work on DEEPDOWN!
Take care!
TRASEVOL_DOG
* TRASEVOL_DOG * 
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