Tiny Crusader

Tiny Crusader is a my take on a *Lemmings™ rougelike crossover*. It's a story about survival, blood and procedurally generated levels!

Play the game in the browser

Instructions

1. Use the mouse to dig tunnels
2. Enjoy the particles!
3. I made it to level 29, beat me!

Behind the scenes

The game was developed using Pico-8, an 8-bit fantasy console that has all the limitations that make game development really enjoyable. The most problematic part was that I wanted a dynamic desructable background (worms, lemmings) but redrawing the screen at 30 fps was out of the question due to performance reasons. I'm not sure that I solved in the most graceful way, but it works (dirty rects and memcpy).

Takeaways using Pico-8

1. Using an external editor is worked well, the built in editor is nice, but for something like this you'd want to use vs code, sublime or something like that.
2. Before the jam I created a small .exe that sends a ctrl+r (run) to the pico-8 window which made iterating very smooth. Would recommend!
3. Adding HUGE ascii comments during the later part of the jam really helped navigating the code when things started to get messy.
4. Using gitlab pages and their ci pipeline for deploying the game every now and then was great. It's comforting to know that I was only an export and a push away from release.

Also, the game was supposed to be called "Tiny Crusaders" - but I was to tired to add the final s. =)