Week 27: Pico-8 Doodles, JOY, 0hGame, bizniz cards

Week 27 wasn’t super productive for JOY but there’s been interesting stuff anyway! I made a game in 0 hour!

First of all, here are the Pico-8 doodles of the week!

 

Bonus: two tweetcarts!

r=rnd
::s::
x=r(128)
y=r(128)
c=pget(x,y-rnd(1))
if(y<1)c=8+rnd(6)
circfill(x,y,1,c)
goto s

— Trasevol Hound (@TRASEVOL_DOG) October 26, 2016

r=rnd
a=0x6000
b=0x2000
::s::
if r(9999)<1 then
l=r(0x800)
memset(a+r(b-l),r(256),l)
end
l=r(0x100)
memcpy(a+r(b-l),a+r(b-l),l)
goto s

— Trasevol Hound (@TRASEVOL_DOG) October 26, 2016

 

The first days of the week were actually spent on designing business cards. I’m ordering them and I wanted to make them good because I like making things good. More specifically I wanted them to look original and not all classy and like-everyone-else’s. Also I like Pico-8 so I made all the design in Pico-8 and then assembled it all with GIMP. Then I tweeted the result and I’ve got feedback and there were iterations. So it took a while. I’m actually still hesitating between two designs, one black and one grey/white. The black one looks better but the white one is more practical because you can write on it and I’ve been told people like to do that. I’m ordering them tomorrow and I think I’ll be taking the grey/white one. There will be a photo when I get them!

 

Quick update on  JOY! As said at the start of this, there hasn’t been very much progress on JOY. The reasons for that are mostly not actually knowing what should be worked on first, being lazy, taking a lot of time making those doodles up there and playing too much Nuclear Throne (I’m getting better though). But there still was some little progress.

First I changed the old background, replacing a circle by an 8-pointed star, then I added a new special ball/boss, and then I started to overhaul the background system. The new special ball is a bit messy and I might not keep it but the new background system is very good and should let me do a lot more of experimenting with my background and I like that a lot!

One other reason that progress is slow on JOY is that I’m thinking of rethinking/rewriting the existing code because it’s not always very easy to work with. I think I’m getting a lot better at writing clean code in Pico-8 but I don’t even really know how to do it in GameMaker. The absence of functions is really throwing me off at times and I need to look at other projects to see how they handle their code. Doing that next week.

 

Now here comes the best part of this post: the 0 Hour Game Jam! On Saturday morning, we changed time here in Europe, going an hour background at 3 am for light-saving reasons, going back to 2 am. And there’s a jam right at that time, between 2 am and 2 am, but an hour later. It’s the 0 Hour Game Jam and I absolutely love this concept and I really wanted to take part in it this year! And I did! Meet TimeKilling, a game made in exactly 0 hour and which you can play here!

But maybe you remember that time I tried making a game in 4 hours and I ended up making it in almost 6 hours. That game was Crash! and at the time, I had thought about making a game in only an hour and it seemed pretty much impossible. Well, let me tell you that yes it’s pretty much impossible.

You can get a mechanic in there and the very bare-bones of a game. Basically you can probably do just the part you’ve been wanting to do beforehand and not much else at all. So if you didn’t really care about sound you won’t make any. If you didn’t really care about sprites you won’t make any. Because if you do have time left, there are more interesting things to spend it on!

I also took the occasion to record the making of the game and made a timelapse of it! Here is the pseudo-non-existant hour reduced to five short minutes!

And that is it for week 27! I consider it a pretty good week!

Next week, I’m reading GameMaker games’ source codes. Then I’m probably enhancing the code of JOY. Then I’m working some more on JOY. And there’ll be Pico-8 doodles!

Have a good week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG