This week went better than the previous ones!
I kept on working on the tiny dungeon game, I made a tweetcart for Valentine’s Day, I published a Pico-8 Doodle and a patreon-exclusive write-up about that doodle, and yesterday I even worked on SUGAR a little!
Tweetcarts are pretty incredible to make. When you’re reducing the code for this cool effect that you’ve come up with, just so that it fits the 280 characters of a tweet, you generally have to use all the tricks that you know and then come up with some more. This process can be very frustrating as you desperately look at the 300+ characters on your screen, trying to find which one you can make disappear and how, but then when you manage to make one or several characters disappear comes a great feeling of satisfaction. And when you finally get to 280, it is the biggest relief.
And so what better way to celebrate this other great source of frustration, satisfaction and relief in the world that is love?
This tweetcart was actually a lot of fun to make even though once again it took a lot more time than I would’ve liked to get it down to 280 character. But I guess that’s just how it goes! The heart shape is defined by a modified version of a “heart curve” snatched off Wolfram MathWorld and I’m especially proud of the way I filled the shape, using some sort of height-buffer!
You can check out the complete code for this tweetcart on this tweet and maybe share it too, even though it’s not as relevant now than it was on the 14th… But let me ask you this: do we really need a specific day to celebrate love??
Moving on!
Screenshake is always a good thing to add.
New effects on the dungeon game! My biggest problem with this game was that the log took the attention away from the board too much, so I decided to make everything shake (but only a little) when things happen on the board and add particles and smoke that appear above the board. I do think it’s better that way but I’m not sure if it’s enough yet.
I also started working on the map generation, choosing how to distribute room types over the board. (some of the room types have yet to be implemented) And I started working on a more complete enemy system, with different enemy types, different stats and different lexicons for the log! I’m considering making a little enemy info panel that you can access through the log, where you can look at the info of any enemy: their name, type, stats and maybe a fun little descriptor à la Pokemon.
I also need to change the interface a little so that I can show the level of our hero character and the floor of the dungeon.
And I decided to take my fancy log system out of the game and make a Pico-8 Doodle out of it because I could and because I thought it would be interesting for my generous patreon supporters!
I even went the extra mile and wrote about this log system, how to use it and how I put it together in an exclusive Patreon post, accessible through the 8$+ reward tiers. The source for the doodle can be downloaded on this page through the 5$+ reward tiers.
I decided to bring back the exclusive write-ups for a number of reasons which I described on this post. I will be trying to write at least one every month and it goes on top of the access to my abandoned and work-in-progress projects in terms of rewards.
SUGAR is also coming back and yes I’m almost definitely calling it SUGAR, all caps and no number.
Right now the priority is making the maths side of the framework a little more complete and implementing determinative (seeded) pseudo-random number generation. Then I’ll be working some more on the gfx API and I’ll get a start on the input system.
As a series of test runs, I am thinking of generating wallpapers with this framework of mine. Hopefully the first ones will come this week and they will be available to all my Patreon supporters! (1$+)
That’s it for this week, and it was a pretty good one!
This next week I’m working on a little collaboration project with my favorite Pico-8 music composer! I will also be working on both the tiny dungeon game and SUGAR, and maybe just maybe I will find some time to write the next Doodle Insights!
Have a great week everyone!
Take care!
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