Here is my entry, Red Venom. It's a horizontal-scrolling shooter made in Pico-8.
Take control of the legendary space fighter Red Venom and defeat the hordes of invading aliens. Right?
Upgrade your ship to do even more damage! Spend points to purchase upgrades, higher scores mean more difficult enemies.
Commentary: This is my first attempt at making something for Ludum Dare and wow, was that stressful. The game in its 'finished' form had absolutely no testing. I was ten minutes away from the deadline and had yet to implement collision with enemy projectiles and one of the end boss' weapons would always wipe out the player in one hit.
Things I wanted to add (but ran out of time for): Scenery collision; music; better graphics for the title screen and hangar; more cutscenes (for example, the original idea was for the best ending to require a pacifist run)
There's a few known bugs: you can shoot whilst dead; the prices of upgrades in the hangar don't scale properly; you can buy the alien translator multiple times; and the translator was meant to cost 400 (lowered to 1 during testing and I forgot to change it back!) :@
If you just want to experience the story, well there's a cheat to skip to the end boss--hold up, X and Z. To get all the different conversations takes a minimum of 4 playthroughs (it's an auto-scroller so that shouldn't be too long!) :)
Pico-8 games are always so nice looking and sounding. It's to bad you became came so close to running out of time but it doesn't show to bad in the game itself. Outside of one or two weird bits of collision and realizing I could still fire without actually being alive I didn't notice anything that stood out to much as being a glitch.
Nice looking game! You can purchase unlimited alien translators. Jokes aside, I enjoyed playing it and the story was interesting, it could be a good game with more time.
I like the pixel art here. It was easy to determine what was terrain vs enemies, except at first I didn't realize the grey blocks were in the background... I was trying to avoid them. I didn't have any problems with my shots landing, though I did run into a bug where I died, shots were coming from the empty space I used to be at, then I died again before respawning. Other than that, it was fine. Nice work on this!
@jharler. Thanks for the detailed feedback. The plan at first was very much to have the player steer their way through the terrain, but I ran out of time. Same goes for the problems when the player dies, I completely ran out of time at the end.
A fun shoot 'em up game, my only critique is that there is no visual indication that the walls are in the background( I tried to avoid them at first). I didn't notice any weird collision errors. Good job overall!
Cheers @justcamh. It was great seeing someone play through my game--really valuable feedback, it will help me a lot in future! Loved the stream, I still have about 6 tabs open of games you demonstrated that I want to try for myself. :)
wow your art is amazing I love it. I'm completely suprised about how detailed art in pico8 can be. I came from my comments as a fellow pico8-er :heart: It's a shame you weren't able to get all the collision functioning.
@thedarkmagi Haha yeah, Pico-8 4 lyfe. I should have just submitted it to the Jam instead of the Compo so I could get more of the game working properly. Anyway, glad you appreciated it and thank you for playing :)
Looks very pretty and handles well (especially like the exhaust of the ship), The lack of stage collision/music is definitely a shame, but I've been there. Still cool
I can actually see the potential in this game if the story was expanded on, and of course with the bugs fixed and more polish. Interesting idea overall!
Cute little shooter! I really liked some of the polish - the ship exhaust and shooting is a really cool effect! I think I got all the story - it's a fun little twist! Shame you left the translator at 1 - you could probably fix that and it would be okay within Compo rules! Still, nice work!
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I have found a bug: You can keep firing after death.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/763143712
But pixel art is awesome!!
Nice PICO-8 game!
But, I really liked the "dialog" part of it. Reminds me of those 16bit shmup classics.
And, having a side-scrolling shooter is not that frequent, so nice!
:clap:
That's not really a common genre I saw on this jam, so kudos to you !
This is dying for a great soundtrack. :)