Cute little game, and congrats on your first compo! Just a small note, I saw a sprint UI bar, but couldn't find the keybind for using sprint (or maybe it isn't implemented, I'm not sure). Your 8bit design is well done and easy to follow, great work this weekend!

This is so cool. You chose wisely by going with PICO-8! It reminds me of an Atari game called Kaboom! And not just because of PICO-8's natural Atari aesthetic, heh.

Very cool compo. Great job and thank you for inspiring me today. =)

@camcomduck Thank you for the kind comments! The sprint bar should have been labeled dash. Perils of game design changes, but I at least now have warning on the game page!

@stephenwhoskins PICO-8 definitely had some tradeoffs, but it was good for prototyping something quickly (within 24 hours, I had most of the game working and I wasn't fully dedicated to the compo during that time). I wasn't aware of kaboom. Part of cauldron was that there were bad apples that would make you lose points. I debated trying to put those in. I wasn't sure if that would work as well with the bat. That said, I was hoping to force more strategic elements by not having it be something where you couldn't collect every falling item.

Cute game, I really enjoyed playing it. Looking forward to your next LD entry!

@liquid Much appreciated!

How do you like them apples? :apple:

I tried it twice and nearly doubled the score on the second try.


This was a nice little arcade-game.

Not entirely sure what limited the use of the dash-skill, the time or the way I moved.

Cheers!

This is a nice arcade game. The simple graphics definitely make me feel like it's an Atari game. I enjoyed playing it. I would only say you need to make the button to start a new game not the same as the play buttons. I had a really good run and then didn't see the score as I dashed right as it ended.

@dis0rder they're okay. I like mine better.  :grin:

Nice simple game with a great retro arcade vibe. I feel like the game really could have used with a "apple collected" sound as some sort of satisfying result would have helped there.

Grats for going compo. It's always a quite satisfying experience, isn't it?
I think some more audio effects and animations would have improved the overall feeling of the game. Nonetheless it's a nice entry.

Nice apple collection game! It's good thing I could send apple horizontally to make collection easier.

@dis0rder Doubling score sounds about right. It's a little bit of a weird concept so it takes a little bit to adjust to. The meter that says sprint should have said dash. It has a recharge time.

@tsaot Not the first person to call out it being like an Atari game. That said, I think it's a good thing as someone who never used one. The pico 8 by default gives you 4 movement buttons and two button pushes. I made sure it was pressed on a frame where the score screen was showing but guess I needed to give it a few frames.

@shoalmuse It wound up being a bit much with a hit sound per an apple and given that hte player's focus should be away from the basket, I thought it would jsut be rnadomness with an apple hitting the basket sound. I've not ever put too much in to sounds (in prior jas, I was purely a coder with minimal game design) so I'll keep in mind that more sound effects are needed (also need to figure out how to do music).

@tanis It certainly was a different experience, and was fun. I'll refer you to the comments immediately above on sound effects, but that does seem to be a take home message.

@bloodbane Yep! Grounds too hard so the apples splatter. You could try to catch them, but how many apples can you hold at once? Obviously the only solution is to hit them towards a basket with a magically soft bottom.

Neat game! Cool to see a game with PICO-8 for compo, not easy to do the first time! Something I think would make it more fun would be to have some way to quickly get to the other side of the map--maybe wrap around the sides? Power up to move over? Since the movement felt a bit slow. Fun nonetheless!

Fun lil' game! Normally I would have lots of feedback, but this one was just a breath of fresh air after doing some bullet-hell kinda games. It was relaxing to do :smile: Maybe the apples could have had some variety to add some visual appeal? Different forms, sizes, colors etc. Maybe even bad apples that subtract from the score or something.

I had fun, and that's most important

Pretty straightforward interpretation of the "collector" theme, yet not one I have seen somebody do previously. I think all the previous feedback has already covered it: really has a cool retro feel, nice job on keeping that alive with the animation that takes me straight back to the origins of games.

@auxiliarymoose First, sorry for the delay in the response. I'm not sure how I missed responding to this. I had thought about mapping left to right briefly. I think it thought it was a natural way to add additional focusing on where to place your character and what apples to go after, but it certainly is worth exploring. Think maybe extending the dash distance would fix some of that? I do feel I could have made that longer and maybe slightly shorten the recharge time

@wouter52 I'm hoping the lack of comments is good (not too far from the goalpost that you don't know where to start commenting). As a first compo, I did want to keep small scope (not quite this small though, but this game stood out in my limited set of ideas). I didn't realize I had access to more colors in PICO-8 until after the jam or else I'd have tried for something a little more visual. Since I was thinking about cauldron while doing this, bad apples were definitly a consideration. I was a bit nervous on introducing that with an automatic hitting bat, and thought that changing the bat to manual would have serious implication (not least of which was losing the dash since I wanted to not use the extended inputs for PICO-8). That also might have worked better if apples fell at different speeds, but that was another change I wasn't quite sure how well it would work out (augmenting the effects of RNG on score).

@tomrijnbeek Totally went for retro ... I'm not a relic born in the early 90s who has never seen an Atari in his life and who took advantage of PICO-8 to make programmer art a style choice. Totally not what happened.

Based on feedback here, definitely sounds like I should have tried some of these other features I was thinking of. I guess I just need to figure out poor man's version control for pico-8 content.