Week 5 – Gear of Gears

Week 5!

This week was mostly about the Pico-8 jam, as expected! Also a tiny bit of flowers, a bigger bit of cellular automata and the 500 Twitter followers milestone!!

Obviously I am going to talk about my entry to the Pico-8 jam, Gears of Gear. However, I am not going to detail how it was made or anything like that. Instead I will present what I wanted to make and then what I made.

So, what Gears of Gear should have been was a shmup-style action game controlled with a panel of gears. There would have been generator gears, classic gears, shield gears and weapon gears and they would control a ship on the bottom half of the screen. You would unlock weapon gears (and effectively weapons) while waves of enemies would come crash onto your canon. You would have had to manage your gears, the place you have and your ammo (spinning weapon gears backward regenerates ammo) while different the types of enemies changed and attack you differently. There would have been a boss at the end.

Gears of Gear is not even a game! It’s a toy where you can place and connect gears and special gears to make a canon shoot bullets of different behaviors on the bottom half of the screen. The different special wheel types control each one aspect of the behavior, such as speed, color, swaying, exploding, etc. That’s pretty much it.

I’m very sad I couldn’t make it an actual game with at least a lose condition but that would have taken time which I didn’t have. But it is OK. The toy isn’t that bad at all, there are pretty colors and I could implement a quick random set generator, which is always nice!

You can go play Gears of Gear here!!!

And now the cellular automata! This week I experimented with random in cellular automata for the first time!! It worked ok!

Also I made a new Twitter-bot inspired from Richard Hawley’s song Tonight The Streets Are Ours! Check it out!!

This week was good!! I made a thing, Gears of Gear! It might not be all I wanted to do but I over-scoped and what I did is OK. And that bunch of cellular automata looks really cool too!

I don’t know what next week will be about. I am torn between making the shmup I wanted to do and working on DEEPDOWN (no it’s not dead).

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG