Hi all! I'm very excited to make my first pico-8 game and publish my first game this weekend! I know unity, and have been working on my first big game project that I talk about here: https://twitter.com/Lambdanaut

I'm taking a break this weekend from that project in order to push out something small and fun that I can be proud of so I can be confident that I've published my first game.

Here we go!

I made some pixel art. I was thinking that I wanted to make a game where you care over little critters in some manner or another.

The game name is BBYS

The idea is to keep these little guys alive as long as possible. You play as their keeper:

Splash screen is done! And the logo bounces very sexily!

Also here's a screenshot of some SICK SICK GAMEPLAY

This is the outline of the final ruleset

My Bbbys have been born! I'm happy with how a lot came out this game jam. I picked up a completely new engine, sound editor, and graphics editor (PICO8) and made all the assets myself. PICO8 was even easier to develop with than I hoped. It was such a breath of fresh air getting away from Unity for a weekend. I'm not the biggest fan of LUA, but it does well as the embedded language that it is.

I was stoked about the ease of using multiple palettes and hotswapping them on the fly. It allowed me to add color into the mechanics of the game. The enemies will priorities your BBYs if they are the same color as them.

What I didn't get finished:

• The storyline. I need to add at least two more levels and a boss fight. The characters are just starting to develop
• The music. Ideally I would have multiple songs. One for each level. Fortunately I made one good song to use on the two levels that exist at the moment. This was my first time with the PICO8 sound editor and I'm actually really happy with how the song turned out.
• The superpowers. I added loads of items that can be picked up and worn by the bbys. It's cute, but it completely lacks any sort of function other than cosmetic. I have a list of powers that each item bestows on the bby. I need to add them!
• Multiple enemy types. I think I'd like to add one more enemy, this one is much faster but has a shorter lifespan.

Heya all! Super stoked to be done with this project! The core gameplay and first two levels were completed in 48 hours for the ludum dare competition, and now I've finished the next two levels, added a boss fight, more storyline, better mechanics, way more features, and even a credits scene.

I was SERIOUSLY pushing the limit of the pico-8's token limit when this was published, and I had to do a lot of refactoring before I was able to export to html5, but it was so worth it.

This is the first game I've completed in 14 years, and the last one just didn't hold a candle to this one's scope, even though realistically it still is a very small and casual game made in exactly one week.

It's also my first PICO-8 game.

Here are some statistics by the end

• 2,450 brand new lines of lua code
• Two individual full-length music tracks created
• 16 sound effects generated
• 22 animated sprites drawn

This was my first large project using the component-entity pattern in a project outside of Unity, and I'm proud of my ability to pull it off successfully. I learned a lot about better ways to structure my code.

I also learned a lot about better ways to check for and structure collisions, which was important for the BBY push mechanic.

Thanks to all that have played my game demo so far. I hope some of you find the time to try out the full game!

Please check it out on itch! You won't regret it :D https://lambdanaut.itch.io/bbys