I only had something like 32 hours to start with because I was busy Friday night, so I'm about halfway. As I'm sure all first-time jammers do, I spent way too much time getting the art and animation going, and for all that it looks pretty wonky. But! I'm pretty happy with the controls and collision detection, which is what I spent a good chunk of my time last night doing, and re-doing, and re-re-doing. I think (fingers crossed!) I've got it going pretty well now though!

Look at that froggo running into that block and not being warped up onto the stairs! Amazing.

And now I have 14 hours to, you know, make the game part. But I got up early today (which I ususally am not great at) and ate some cereal, so here we go!

This thing is probably not gonna be nearly finished by 6pm, but I'm gonna get it as close as I can, at least. Just got multiple areas working...it's gonna be really short if it's anything, but it's been a great first run so far!

Phew, right under the wire, but I made it a technically playable, completable game with 15 minutes to spare, which I spent throwing in some credits rather than trying to add anything substantial and breaking everything. Gonna figure out how to upload this now, but I feel mildly accomplished!

I nowhere near completed my vision - a couple hours ago I stared at the clock and decided my only way I'd ge anything remotely playable would be to make the rest of the areas boring placeholders that would be really bland, but at least playable. I'll probably circle back around to this and polish it up later, if only to finish what i started, but for compo, it's done enough!

Just uploaded a couple post-release tweaks to Frogs vs. Cats that I think qualify as bugfixes - most importantly, added X as an alternate high-jump button, since up+down is pretty difficult on mobile, and impossible with some controllers and the like.

I'll probably keep tinkering with it outside of LD from this point - improve the later levels' appearance (that is, make them more than one map), change the background colors...I've already made the grate locked in a non-compo branch - improve some of the text that just made it under the wire and doesn't quite fit (although "you look grate" does make me chuckle). And, of course, make the cats actually, uh, affect the game at all, and have something to do vs. the frogs. Ah well.

But now I'm excited to go through and try a bunch of the other games, I saw some scroll by that I'm excited to give a run!

Anyone build mobile, or mobile-web-friendly games they want me to try? I've mostly seen keyboard-based games so far, comment if you've got something I can play on my phone!

Hey all! Yet another post-compo update post. I started the compo about 16 hours late, so there were a lot of gaps, in the compo game, but I got far enough (and had enough fun!) that I wanted to keep improving. If you haven't tried the compo version and want to rate it, make sure to check out and rate the original version first. Frogs vs. Cats is a text-adventure platformer that is backwards from many of the other delightful text-adventure mashups I've seen (see below for more on that!), in that you control the frog around the platform in order to drive the text-adventure, which is spelled out in the sky above you, rather than controlling the game via text. Here's a little preview - the hopping gives it a bit of an original Prince of Persia feel, I think:

Once you've rated the compo version (or decided not to rate it!), if you want to play something at least a little more polished, I've piled up enough little improvements (54 commits worth!) to post an update, I think. I've actually locked the doors, refined the controls, added a title screen with directions, fleshed out the levels, added more sounds, refined the text dialog and interactions, and of course squashed a few bugs. Check it out over on the PICO-8 BBS.

Many thanks to the commenters who have left much helpful feedback in the comments so far, especially @antti-haavikko for the detailed run-down that led directly to several of the improvements! Sidenote, I highly recommend their game Binary Blocks, it's incredibly polished and a lot of fun.

And on that note, a shout-out to a couple other text-adventure based games I've seen and loved: Birdy is a delightful little puzzle-platformer with the text elements well-integrated into the game: the more advanced moves are longer and harder to type, and a key element of the challenge is typing them out in time - it's challenging, adorable, and a lot of fun.

AeroWrit is a very different take - a text-adventure flight simulator! It's very well done, the tutorial is top-notch and guides you through the commands very well, and the game itself is a fun little find-the-rings game, that makes very good use of the text-adventure component in a way that works really well and makes it a lot of fun.

If you have other text-adventure mashups, post them below - I'd love to try them out! And keep an eye out for a future post, I'm gonna get back to my game and actually make the "vs" in the title mean something :smile: