DEV Community: Tóth Béla

Shoot'em up Witch game | PICO-8 GameDev

Tóth Béla — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 07:40:00 +0000

This article was taken from my Ko-Fi page, where you check more of my stuff! If you like what I do, you can support me with a price of a single coffee!

The Backstory

Back from a bit of a break I'm bringing you a whole new game, which supposedly will be finished in 2-3 weeks!

If you are following the PICO-8 world you should be already aware of LazyDev's channel and his amazing shmup game tutorial series. Since I've been always interested in those games I always wanted to make one myself, so here is the opportunity. A showcase "jam" event was also announced for the series so we can hit two birds with one stone! Let me show you what I've been working on!

Shmups

A "shoot 'em up", also known as a "shmup" is a game in which the you fight against a large number of enemies by shooting at them while dodging their fire and movement. You fight either waves or an endlessy scrolling battlefield and fight bosses with various attack patterns.

Galaga, a NES smup game, is the most commonly known smup game from the NES era, and most games to this day mostly follow the above said patterns.

Sligth variation in the genre is the way of movement for example Gradius followed the path of moving to the right. This game is particularly close to my heart as I played a ton of it back in the days, so I went with this way of base movement.

The project basics

I wanted a cute witch game for a while but never really found a great opportunity to make one, because of this as soon as the idea of the project popped up, i went with the witch theme!

A quick demo was quicky assembled to see if i like the general aesthetic and I was quite pleased how it looked so went town on the basics! Drew some sprites, implemented the explosion in my way from the tutorial series and made the first dummy wave to check if eveything works!

The shooting flash on your hands, the light blue bullets and the blue explosions flying off and fading aways quickly created an amazing game feel and helped me to crunch through the first day of implementing more enemies and features! The flash is simply a sprite which we draw upon our character for a short time after shooting, the explosions are a bit more complicated code on them:
HERE

Enemies striking back

There is one thing really missing (other than enemy variety) is them attacking you!

The attacks are based on a Mission system, where each enemy has a mission to fulfill and follow. The tutorial series has an amazing video explaining it in more depths here, but the gist of it is we have mission like "flyin" and "attack" and cycle those with timers. After that we can define a unique movement for each enemy. Notice how bats only move forwards while the pesky crows are trying to snipe you from their position sharply turing on you! Here is a rundown on my attack patterns so far.

The only thing we are missing is the enemy projectiles so let's add them to the game! Nothing fancy, bullets have an (sx,sy) vector for their movement speed and they move accordingly. Enemies then are either choosen at their "protect" stationary phase to shoot at you or they have an attack phase that does so. (Ignore the cat in the corner and the blue heart for now)

Now we have the basics down, so how about we create our first boss!

But what enemy could serve as our equal foe?

Another witch of course who went mad for some yet unknown reason!

Prepare for a witch battle!

Power-ups!

What is a Shooter game without power ups?

Of course they won't spawn this frequent, I just wanted to make a cool looking gif for you. We have shields, we have potions, multiple fire types and the screen swiping cat bomb!

As of know the cat bomb doesn't really work the way i want it, but the showcase lasts a month and I wanted a quick powerfull effect in the game!

With the shields I'm quite happy. Alongside their blue circle break effect and the pink puffs when you take damage the game let's you know of danger with style.

Also for the time being there is no weight system added to pickups, so eveything drops with equal chance. That will surely have to change as cat bombs will be far too powerful to drop so frequent.

What is left?

Actually a lot. While the wave system is complete i don't have that many crafted. More enemies and bosses should also be and lastly sound effects and music.

Sounds are in the game, but they are all made by me. Asked for a talented friend of mine BeforeYouCloseYourMind (Soundcloud, Bandcamp) for some help, if time allows he will help with the project!

For the end, there is an idea of mine to restructure how bosses work, which may lead to a 2 day journey down the code, reworking things but I think it will for the better on the long run!

Big thank you to Csöndi and Sztrovacsek, for supporting my work!

Wanna see your name here? See more frequent updates? Longer PicoShorts? Or you just like what i do? Consider supporting my work with even the price of a single coffee, and if you can please share my work, so more people can enjoy the magical world of PICO-8.

Other social sites:
🐦 Twitter
📷 Instagram
🎥 Twitch
🎬 YouTube

Games and devlogs i made:
⌨️ GitHub repos
🎮 Itch.io
🕹️ Newgrounds

PICO-8 GameDev | Making Abilities Look Better

Tóth Béla — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 19:07:07 +0000

This article was taken from my Ko-Fi page, where you check more of my stuff! If you like what I do, you can support me with a price of a single coffee!

Last week I left you off with abilities added to the game! Dashes and Fireballs are cool, but these still lack that oomph, the extra level of detail. That was last week's job to fix, so let's get to what I did!

Particles and effects to the Rescue!

During the week I was looking for some feedback on social media on how to improve things I got, and one of the suggestions (and of course, plans) were to add more effects to picking up power-ups! I created a whole new particle type, which basically is a circle with some random movements to it, and upon pickup I create a few of them with varying lifetime to add a bit more variety into it. (see code snippets: HERE)

If you ask me, this is already better, but something is still missing. Some impact, something that makes us feel strong! Makes us feel that something important is happening! One way you could do this is to pause everyting else in the game while the pickup is happening! (see code: HERE)

Now we are cooking with gas! The whole world stops of for us! But I think we can go ever further beyond! Lets add some flashing to the player to indicate some big change!

We are changing forms and addig polish every step, but I have one last trick up in my sleeve! Do you know how we made ground pounds better? What makes everything better? That's right, camera shake! So let's add the biggest cheat in the history of game making to this little project!

Yes, this is the final punch in our arsenal! The good ol' camera shake! It's a small and subtle shake but I felt like everything bigger is distracting from the game! One last thing we could do is of course to add some spice to the fireballs them self!

They look really sad and just overall simple and immersion breaking in their current form. Fireballs should have sparks and smoke coming off them, so let's use our particles that we deploy upon breaking boxes or ground pounds, assign new colors to them and create new ones for the fireball along it's path!

The cherry on top

One last thing that is missing is a very crucial part of game design and sadly a part that I'm not very skilled at. I can make the jankest codes to achieve things, I can fiddle around with art, or just go for a very minimalist look (Looking at you Neon Runner👀), but you need to feel the empty silence of a game. That's right I'm talking about sound effects and the dreaded soundtracks. I'm not good with music. I'm actually terrible at it, that's why none of my games has one (Clock Mage has but it shouldn't, trust me).

You can, you shouldn't really, avoid soundtracks but sound effects are a different thing. You need them for every game. You need them to make punches and hits feel real, to add the extra oomph and power, to help explosions feel like explosion (can you imagine one without any sound?) so I could not avoid doing them. So, without further rambling, here is a video about the game as gifs don't really excel at giving sounds across:

I'm not the happiest with every little detail but for the alpha version they will do. The main theme I want to come across with is a cute little platformer hence the squeeky almost rubber toy like sounds.

Oh yeah, and trees

Before I forget writring about them, yeah we got trees in the game! The sprite work is simple, created basically everything to make custom sized trees however I want them!

But the best part is, you may picked it out earlier, that they work like one way platforms! Passable from under but standable on top! This is a new addition to the codebase that let's you create all kind-of semi-solid platforms one of the basics of platformer games! Let's see how!

Basically we have Flag 2 set for each upper part for the trees:

But not set one for basic "ground checks", which is Flag 0:

Why would I do it this way? Because now I don't need to add something to the code part which checks ceiling collisions and only add this Flag 2 check for ground collision. This helps the code to be a bit cleaner as we don't have that much checks everywhere which is a nightmare to debug. (see code: HERE) And we have semi solid platforms!

That is the end for this update! PicoShorts will be postponed for the next weekend due to a game jam event that I'm participating this week!

If you like the new code shares, let me know down below! And as always, take care, have a nice day!

Big thank you to Csöndi and Sztrovacsek, for supporting my work!

Wanna see your name here? See more frequent updates? Longer PicoShorts? Or you just like what i do? Consider supporting my work with even the price of a single coffee, and if you can please share my work, so more people can enjoy the magical world of PICO-8.

Other social sites:
🐦 Twitter
📷 Instagram
🎥 Twitch
🎬 YouTube

Games and devlogs i made:
⌨️ GitHub repos
🎮 Itch.io
🕹️ Newgrounds

More PICO-8 Gamedev - Retro Camera, Abilites

Tóth Béla — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 20:40:22 +0000

This article was taken from my Ko-Fi page, where you check more of my stuff! If you like what I do, you can support me with a price of a single coffee!

This week was quite active for me on the gamedev side, thanks to the bug I fixed last time. It opened up the project for more fun stuff and helped to relieve some stress that was building up due to the issue, so let's see what was done!

Retro Camera:

If you’ve seen past gifs about the project you can pretty much notice one thing that may be bothering you. The smallest change in the player's position drags the camera immediately. This is due how the camera is moved atm, as I just assign the player coordinates to it’s center, which may cause some issues with how quickly it snaps and jiggles as you move around and I wanted to avoid that at all cost.

In old games there was a system implemented into the game that basically let the player move around in the center of the screen freely, without triggering camera movement. This is not a really difficult feature to code, as you only need to set boundaries and check if the player is inside or outside of them, and adjust the camera only when we happen to be outside.

The code is easy and the result speaks for itself if you ask me. You can now adjust movement and position without twitching the camera like crazy.

Dashing ability:

Do you remember the gift I left you last time?

At that point the ability was hardcoded and I have a button set to cycle around the power up stages, that is why you saw the Dino already in the yellow form. So with all the code done, let’s do some art!

For the moment I’m working with mystical flowers that let you change power-up states, which may change in the future. This one is simple yellow one with some flash to let me feel some forward motion in the project, and to be honest I really like how it looks animated in the game!

Fireball ability:

Since I started posting about this project you could see the red sprite for the player but nothing special was happening. Well because I haven’t done anything yet! This issue got tackled as well this week, with adding some really simple frames and doing a few lines of code. Added a really simple fireball rotation animation (see above cursor) and went coding!

I have a separate collection for my firebally, a add_fireball function, which takes position and speed and to top it all an update and a draw function. Basically they are moved according to the speed and checked for any enemy collision, on which both the fireball and the enemy dies. At the moment i haven’t coded any special movement into them (like the bounce in Super Mario) nor do they have collision with the environment. The latter is gonna change for sure but not sure on a special movement for them yet, so that is up for the future!

Ending and future plans:

So that is all that I have for this week. If you want to follow the project more closely you can check the newly created GitHub table for more frequent updates!

The other thing I was wondering about is maybe to upload the weekly “build” of the game for Ko-Fi supporters, so if you are interested in something along that line don’t be afraid to comment down below!

That is the end for this update! PicoShorts will be postponed for the next weekend due to the lack of time to write the article!

Big thank you to Csöndi, for supporting my work!

Wanna see your name here? See more frequent updates? Longer PicoShorts? Or you just like what i do? Consider supporting my work with even the price of a single coffee, and if you can please share my work, so more people can enjoy the magical world of PICO-8.

Other social sites:
🐦 Twitter
📷 Instagram
🎥 Twitch
🎬 YouTube

*Games and devlogs i made: *
⌨️ GitHub repos
🎮 Itch.io
🕹️ Newgrounds

Doing some actual GameDev again!

Tóth Béla — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 14:40:43 +0000

This article was taken from my Ko-Fi page, where you check more of my stuff! If you like what I do, you can support me with a price of a single coffee!

Lately I got back to PICO-8 and picked up a project that was originally meant for the Retrograde jam, where your goal was to create a game, that would feel like to old NES times.

Things got in the way and never really finished for the jam but i have some things I can share now.

Of course my goal is to create an oldchool platformer game, and finish it! Like not just doing most of the stuff but polishing things up, sound effects, levels the whole shebang.

The game will revolve around you findig the stolen eggs and rescuing your partner. Of course the journey will be dangerous so various power-ups will help you along the way. You can jump on the head of your enemies or use the mysteries of the world and enter a form where you can spew scorching fireballs to clear your way!

Don't forget to use your T H I C C booty and use it to destroy walls and your enemies!

I know this isn't that much to show, struggled with some code issues that I caused myself and let me tell you, my jank code is even hard to read for myself.

For the longest time my collision for some "unknown" reason just let you glitch inside block if you stood right on the edge and pressed the jump button. It was hard to decode at first where it came from, as my jump detection didn't show any errors which would be your first target with such issues.

After many frustrated hours I finally found the solution, it being caused by the horizontal collision detection. Basicaly which direction the player is moving and using an offset based on that to check the blocks right or left to you for wall collision. The only issue is that for some reason I used a way to small value when the player was facing right, hence you could just walk "halfway" into the walls. You pressed jump and the code was like: Oi, your head on the ceiling, get down from there" and pushed you down a block, causing the glitch.

Hooray, problem found, solved and now I can progress further with implementing Proof-Of-Concept stuff, polishing things that are in and thinking on new features to add. (Also the code is due to some refactoring, but we don't talk about that. It's a problem for future me).

That is the end for this update! Will see what I can due and maybe push out a PicoShort as well for the weekend, but no promises.

Big thank you to Csöndi, for supporting my work!

Wanna see your name here? See more frequent updates? Longer PicoShorts? Or you just like what i do? Consider supporting my work with even the price of a single coffee, and if you can please share my work, so more people can enjoy the magical world of PICO-8.

As always thanks for reading and have a nice day!

Other social sites:
🐦 Twitter
📷 Instagram
🎥 Twitch
🎬 YouTube

*Games and devlogs i made: *
⌨️ GitHub repos
🎮 Itch.io
🕹️ Newgrounds

All my links in one place:

🌳Linktr.ee

Hacktoberfest 2021, PR #1

Tóth Béla — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 15:15:41 +0000

This article was taken from my Ko-Fi page, where you check more of my stuff, and support me if you wish to!

Now, onto the article!

Clock Mage was a game jam entry of mine for the first My little Roguelike jam back in 2020. I really liked the jam the people were amazing, the submissions awesome, and overall i really got into the mood of programming, even had a few livestreams, and a lot of progress tweets, so i was pretty happy with it.

So happy, that it i wanted to remake the whole thing in the Godot Game Engine, to expand on it, as i hit a major roadblock in the PICO-8 project, namely tokens. The "engine" has several hard limits on your code (to invoke oldschool programming challanges and feels) and one of them is the infamous 8192 tokens. I struck it several times during the development, cut it back a few times, but decided that a small scope may just be better for the project, and left it after a few little updates, and turned to the Godot remake.

That is going pretty well, but i alway had a longing to finish and polish up the PICO-8 version, which i started working on, but soon hit the roadmark of the tokens again. Well, nothing left, to dust down my "skill" and learn a bit more about what and how to optimise, so in the end this Pull Request was born, freeing up almost a hundred tokens with one easy trick.

Local variables. In PICO-8, typing player.health counts as two tokens, so if you really depend on these kind of data during a function it's much better to just declare a local health = player.health, which cost 4 (health, =, player, health), so if i can replace 8 of these calls, it'll only use 12 tokens instead of 16, which might seem low, but it will accumulate quickly. This really helps if your UI's position depends on the players position.

There are a few quick fixes included in the PR, which i did not comment on sadly.

One of them is the director.maxCredit = flr(director.maxCredit/2) line, which honestly is a really big deal. My game depends on the so called Director, which spawns chest, enemies, sets costs, rewards etc... On each stage there is a teleport which you need to activate to progress, if you can survive a minute. During this time the Directors spawn credit is doubled to enable way more enemies to spawn, and i somehow forgot to reset it...

The other is pretty closely related, and just as "dumb". I'm calculating a very simple difficulty in the game (time spent and level count), and for a long time i did not notice that i do not apply any of this. "How can you not notice that?" you may ask, and my answer is the issue just describe above. As i did not reset the teleporter event credit spike, the game got harder on it's own, and with a much higher spike than i originally wanted. One issue masked the other, so now things should be okay on this front.

Future plans are to reduce tokens even more, my enemy AI part is full of these kind of these, and maybe optimise, and some day we may have some space to add a boss to the game as well.

If you also want to join the Hacktoberfest 2021 just click the link, and the page will introduce you to everything you need to know!

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Thanks for reading and have a nice day!

Other social sites:
🐦 Twitter
📷 Instagram
🎥 Twitch
🎬 YouTube

Games and devlogs i made:
⌨️ GitHub repos
🎮 Itch.io
🕹️ Newgrounds

All my links in one place:
Linktr.ee