A short RTS-style game made in PICO-8, where your goal is to make robots to defeat a big alien monster.
The catch? You have to kill small, cute robots to do it!
CONTROLS:
Arrow Keys
Z to confirm/open menu
X to close menu
HOW TO PLAY:
Open the menu and navigate to robots to select them. After selecting them, hit “send” to send them to go gather resources. Eventually they will return but unable to work any more.
Tips: -You need to make a total of 6 Big Robots to win. -Sometimes, robots will stop moving while gathering resources. If this happens, you'll have to kill them. (I'd like to pretend this is a feature but it's just a glitch i didnt have time to fix, oops)
Interesting game for Pico 8. It reminds me of random old simulation games in the dos days that I had lying around with no manuals or help files. Just press all the buttons and observe what happens. I managed to settle in on grinding up resources but I hit a runtime error. I was sending a bunch of small bots at the time.
Extra fun points for the ability to talk to robots! I got to kill the final boss but I made sure not to send the robots that had cool names, so that I could keep them around at the end. There is something that seems lacking in the mechanics; after a while there’s enough resources to build about anything, and it’s just a matter of browsing quickly in the menus to build and kill robots… maybe it shouldn’t be as easy? I don’t know.
@samh I’m glad you enjoyed the talking mechanic! The names are actually based on a D&D campaign that I run. I agree though, it does feel like it needs balancing and that there should be some more things to do towards the end
It was somewhat difficult to figure out what to do at first (and I never did realize what those red things were), but I genuinely had fun playing this game! Keep at it!
Cute robots! Really liked talking with the small ones!
The mechanic was really confusing and took me a while to understand. I couldn't defeat the boss because for some reason the game became really sluggish and unplayable once I've had too many robots :(
I liked how you made the resource the gatherer unit, it's really a good twist in the rts genre! With more time and polish, I think you could do really good game! I think you could improve the game-play by making it more intuitive, maybe? Giving the player more rewards and maybe making it more challenging?
I had a little bit of trouble figuring out the menu system, but once I did I understood what was going on. Very neat. I liked the creativity and the fact that this was very different from most of the others I'm seeing. Nice work.
Really neat take on the genre. I do find that needing to manually kill robots is rather tedious. I suspect this is a theme consideration, but it feels like itjust makes the game less fun.
It took me a while to fully understand how you gained the second resource. I guess that'll teach me for skipping the instructions.
Lovely mood in this, it's very retro in a good way. I would have liked some music, but that's about the extent of my complaints in the atmosphere department.
The graphics and the animations are really cute ! Some actions in the game were a bit tedious but i understand that it's not an easy task to make an rts in pico 8. It would have nice to choose between repairing a destroyed robot or killing it because for now since you can only do one action it might as well have been automatic. It sometimes lacked a bit of feedback for when choosing a menu option but good job anyway !
Comments20
A good game.
The mechanic was really confusing and took me a while to understand. I couldn't defeat the boss because for some reason the game became really sluggish and unplayable once I've had too many robots :(
I liked how you made the resource the gatherer unit, it's really a good twist in the rts genre! With more time and polish, I think you could do really good game!
I think you could improve the game-play by making it more intuitive, maybe? Giving the player more rewards and maybe making it more challenging?
Really nice game, nonetheless. Keep it up! :)
Really neat take on the genre. I do find that needing to manually kill robots is rather tedious. I suspect this is a theme consideration, but it feels like itjust makes the game less fun.
It took me a while to fully understand how you gained the second resource. I guess that'll teach me for skipping the instructions.
Lovely mood in this, it's very retro in a good way. I would have liked some music, but that's about the extent of my complaints in the atmosphere department.
Nice work!