Fun little arcade game, and a cool idea! Well done in making this so quickly. It was a little difficult to get a grasp on the controls and the order of the colors initially, but once I got over that hurdle, it was deceptively fun to play. Challenging too, but not overly much. Well done!

Thanks!

The nice part of having 4 disjoined working hours is that I could forget how to play, and therefore keep the difficulty manageable. I even changed the various parameters (speed, reactivity, bubble size/number) several times :wink:

After the death - the game is not restarted(
PIKO-8 forever!8)

Hi score:


Fun/cute arcade game, congrats on getting something out in only 4h :D impressive

Hi!

I really enjoyed the game and there are some interesting mechanics here.

My only pet peeve was that I couldn't get the game to restart once I died... I tried pressing every key :cry:

Keep up the good work!

Good game with so little development time. Easy to play, hard to master. I had difficulty switching colors fast enough and move fast enough to shoot correctly. It seems like the color you currently have selected does not appear in the bubbles, which makes sense (you have to die at some point) but makes it also a bit frustrating.

Nice work for only 4 hours :D

Four hour bros!!! Way to knock out a whole game in not nearly enough time.

OOoh that'S a mental challenge to keep color order in your mind, change quick enough...!

Some suggestions on the gameplay:
* Having a visual indicator at the bottom of incoming bubble would be nice ( like a horizontal bar of the color, that would shrink and become a bubble), would help anticipate the future.
* For the color of your bubble instead of hidding the next and having to have the cognitive workload, have the border of the bubble with all the color and x rotate tue bubble a quarter turn.

My first pico game I played. Was cool. I like the colors and the bubbles. I was having issues restarting the game on Windows Web Browser (just refreshed page instead). Here's my high score...[Capture.PNG](///raw/296/f1/z/3d8f0.png) [If it doesn't show 2513 Depth]

I like the bubble around the player that show how much air you have.

It feels very frantic to toggle between different colors, it could probably be enough with two, or use the two buttons to shoot different colored shots.

@glitchman indeed, there's a bug :disappointed:

I'll try to fixit tonight, as I don't think that particular one would be against the rules.

@bridgeonastick yes. It wasn't the case in the beginning, but upon testing, it felt better. As otherwise I would never change color and just wait for the correct one to arrive.

@dhim the mental challenge is by intention. It reminds me of those retro 80 games that you had to memorise mechanics a little. And it became very satisfying once mastered.

On the "color preview", i had some "easy/med/hard" difficulty levels planned, with or without hints, and with different numbers of colors. But ran out of time.

@ristoretto the controls were reversed in the begining. D-pad to shoot a color, and a/b to go left right. But it felt *very* awkward. And the modal color felt a little challenging to master. But not super complex either.

@thesnide Then I stand corrected if it is intentional ! the game mechanic is really clever, congrats!

So, I fixed the restart-the-game crash.

Great little game! I was having trouble separating different colors from each other, but then I realized my screen's night filter was on...

Maybe make the player bubble a tad faster?

Nice job! It's an original game, and in 4 hours too! That is what Ludum is all about.

Plus points for Pico8 too ;)

A nice little game! I also used PICO-8 so I know how hard this jam was. :sweat_smile:

I was not good at this game, but I can appreciate how unique and creative the concept is. At one point I decided to just stick to one color and wait for the bubbles to come to me, but alas, the bubbles never came. I realize that's probably intentional to make people actually have to play the game properly. haha

@neverautomatic yes. The bubbles are never of the same color as the player. Specifically to avoid that strategy 😉

tfw you're too small to shoot bublets and all you can do is dodge bubbles and await your fate :sweat_smile:

Would be good to have an indication of what the bubble colour sequence is as you switch. I kept panicing. I also think you start off pretty fast and don't get much time. It would be able to switch both ways through the colours so you can go back after you go past the colour.

The SFX were nice, loved the loading screen and the sfx for that. I was also unable to press x to reset at the game over screen?

I tried to shoot, but x just changed color.

Nice ring effect for your lives. I'm too bad a shooters so I didn't get far. Good entry!

I really love this! I think it's a perfect balance between abstraction (geometric shapes) and suggestive imagery. Technically you only used a circle shape, yet I felt like I was plunging in the ocean. Thank you for fixing the bug!!!

@homlet yes. That was a bug. But upon testing it felt a nice touch and I declared it a feature :rofl:

@astronautmikedexter Indeed, a game tutorial overlay would have been nice, but I didn't have time for it. That said, once you try it 3-4 times, you get the habit. I know, as I'm usually a very candidate for those. And each hour, I had to "relearn" it :wink:

@fractal-flower-girl ah, sorry, indeed. the fire/color button were swapped. I fixed the bug.

@mdotedot well, I'm also quite bad usually. Therefore here it is a game of avoiding and only focusing on a single big bubble at a time.

@pixelportalz Yeah. But this copes very well for PICO8, but I tried to port some of those "geometric shapes" to a 8bit console, and it is painful to align with sprites.

I actually started this LD with sprites, to be able to port it afterwards. But didn't pursue. Also the collision function was AABB at the beginning, but went to a circle one, as it felt strange to do AABB

I didn't expect to find there a madman who uses Pico-8 for an official competition and there it is! Awesome concept, pity you only had 4 hours of work.

@thesnide I hear ya!! gamedev is so brutal :) congrats on your wonderful game and on overcoming the struggle 💪
You really inspire me to try pico8, i used godot

@pixelportalz I wanted to use something else than PICO8 at first, but P8 is so damn effective. It enables you to focus on gameplay, that it fits my timeline pretty well.

@goldenpalazzo In my humble opinion, I see it almost as cheating. As I said, it is so damn effective for the compo. And there were many entry in the past LDs, but its novelty kindof faded.

I wanted to do a NES game at first, but the gameplay didn't really work out. And in 4h... well...

But I really need to do it for the next LD :wink:

High score: 1700ish
Love the retro theme. I appreciate that the game and controls were simple to learn. Tell me though is there some code in there that when I become a certain color, it makes it less likely that bubbles of that color appear? Because it felt like it ;)

@ethanthopkins indeed, bubbles will never be your own color. It is subtle, but fundamental aspect of the gameplay :wink:

I tried the game after you debugged it, but o wouldn't my color.

Pico8, man. You brought a knife to a gunfight. For 4 hours it's solid finished game. I think people spend more than 4 hour in this game in total. =) I spend 10 mins.

I tried your game and it's really cool, the 8-bit sound fits well with the universe, good job

Almost missed a PICO-8 game if not for your comment (since it wasn't tagged as such when I went through all the PICO-8 tagged games on there).

Simple, but considering the short time spent making it still impressive. Switching to the correct color gets really challenging. Feeling quite stupid waiting for similar colors to spawn and then reading that's not possible. Clever mechanic though.

@nekusoul oh. Where can I tag it correctly?

As, I'd like to [try and rate](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/diving-bubble/im-looking-for-pico8-games-to-rate) all of those.

@thesnide You can add it under "Edit Game" -> "Tags".

You can also find all of the LD48 Pico-8 submissions that were published on itch: https://itch.io/games/tag-ludum-dare-48/tag-pico-8

Outside of I've also found the gaje Diggleloid from Zep (the creator of PICO-8) which was published on the PICO-8 BBS: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=42622

@nekusoul :face_palm: i was searching in the ldjam site, since there's a lot of platform listed. Now fixed, thanks!

Yeah. Zep is awesome for making pico8. It has many clones, but i really like the polish the original has. And the community is unmatched.

Very much like raspberrypi and arduino that aren't the best or cheapest hardware, but the biggest community by far.

nice! interesting, unique gameplay. A bit hard to change colors. Nice work for 4 hours!!

ooh, thank you @nekusoul ; I've also been looking for other pico-8 games and didn't realize it was that easy!

Hey this is nice and I'd love to see it developed further. Perhaps over on the Lexaloffle BSS :)

I really like the games general mechanic of colour matching to get a plus, mismatch to get a minus but somehow I feel it would be a lot more playable if it went in the other direction :D

One other comment, the story makes no sense but lol it's a game so who cares!