Down climber (Pico-8) by Prunus Padis
Summary
Game made with pico 8, delve into the depths of a mountain
A simple but punishing down going platformer.
Controls: arrows and z.
Follow the guides for mechanics. And yes it ends when you think it does.
Unfortunately i didn’t have time to get my parallel world mess thing working so its kinda short (could have been 3x longer)
Thoughts
This was my first real touch to pico 8, which is a fun fantasy console. I simulated doing a "offline jam" so i didn’t search for any solutions during the jam from the internet and only relied on the pico-8 manual and this nice cheat sheet Trying to get max level depth of the supported space lead to a creative solution and bad solution. Trying to create a custom physics engine from scratch without any support is fun but taxing.
Still, I am pretty impressed on how well i got the things working. I would recommend anybody who is into game engines to try-out developing in with some-kind of old school emulator or fantasy console.
Source files
Downloads include the p8 as zip and txt file, you can just change the txt back to p8 if you have pico-8
If you look at my code, pls dont, its a horrible mix match of panic solutions in a new environment.
| Alternative web play | https://prunuspadis.itch.io/downclimber |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/down-climber-pico-8 |
Ratings
| Overall | 148th | 3.463⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 117th | 3.439⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 86th | 3.622⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 51th | 4.024⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 148th | 3.415⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 138th | 3.3⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 189th | 2.458⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 121th | 3.5⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
@dnp yeah i notice that bug but decided to let it be incase people notice and want to abuse it + not wanting to break anything (my collision is a mess).
The game itself works like a charm, I liked the feeling of old schoolness. Good job I would say.
Good game ^_^
Reminds me of a DOS game; Crystal Caves. A game that in a similar vein that kills you a lot, but with a very different kind of play.
Cool. And PICO 8, nice
Some criticisms:
- The way you activate the rope didn't feel the most natural to me. Maybe Z could do that as well? It felt a bit awkward to just completely let go and trust the rope would kick in to save me.
- Some areas required me to sneak over an edge and catch a 1-tile wall to avoid falling. I wasn't a huge fan of those sections, especially since I wasn't entirely clear on what the hitboxes were. At least during the tutorial section, I think I would stay away from finicky movements like that.
- Twice the game seemed to force me to simply fall/glide down to a platform from a decent height, and there didn't seem to be a good way to avoid it. Both times, I simply respawned at the spawn point on the platform I was trying to land on. Maybe I just happened to touch the spawn point when landing...? But, I'm not sure I did. Is this some kind of failsafe? Do the spawn points just work differently than I thought?
- This is acceptable for a game jam project, but there was a lack of feedback. Dying just instantly cut to me standing next to my last spawn point, with no fanfare. Spawn points themselves also had no feedback; I'm only assuming they're spawn points because I don't know what else they could be, and I seemed to respawn next to them after dying. There was no explanation in-game. I'd recommend maybe just having some text that says "Checkpoint!" or something.
Good work overall. Might check this out again in the future if you decide to add more content in a post-jam update. I think there's some room for interesting level designs using this mechanic that this prototype didn't have the time to explore.
@python-b5 Thanks a lot for the longer criticism! Point of the rope mechanic was to be somewhat a trust thing, you got to "trust" the rope when climbing etc. Also so its not too punishing to acidentally letting go when climbing a wall. But yes i agree that i could be weird to play with it like that. Sneak and catch a edge is a result of me failing to do proper "climb up/down a corner" mechanic (the climb up uses a bug to work). Initially i didnt mean to allow for any movement while in air. The spawnpoints activite when you get near it, and i didnt fix the "even if you fall miles into it" bug. And yes i wholy agree on lack of more feedback. There is a slight sprite change on checkpoint activation, and i wanted to keep some of that old school we dont tell things.
I like player have ability to climb walls up and down and use rope. Really helpful especially in deep drop.
nice little game ! :)