Continued, A short dev post about a tiny stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

For something I'm just slowly making for fun on the side of my side-side projects it has been fun to isolate scope so heavily. Here's a short update of how it's going.

Last weekend I tweeted a new gif of the intro area in the game. I was tweeting on a Saturday night, not expecting much but a whole lot of people were sharing and showing interest. I was grateful!

Previously I mentioned the code limit updates in pico-8 and sticking to the original 32k limit for my own constraints... So far I haven't been too far over and I've made significant progress on the game as a whole. Lately I've also been coding a lot more freely instead of carefully, so I might even still make it by the time I'm done - The important factor is I don't need to sacrifice the game itself on the limits so I won't do that if it comes to it.

What is PROJECT CEDAR?

One thing I was trying to nail down was this. Not like, what type of game but what is it to me and what is it I want from it ultimately, aside from just the basic concepts.

I've been in a weird transitiony headspace for a long time (like, yeaaars). The end of 2015 and leading into 2016 I was starting to figure it out, and now I finally have.

While this game is a love letter to games that occupied my mind growing up, it's part of something so much bigger to me – I can't wait to release it.

Actual progress

I've finished all the core mechanics and gameplay, as far as code goes that isn't level/story specific it's feature complete. I've also finalized the first couple of levels as a whole, and I've also polished and finished more of the story stuff. The first full play through is prettty close to playable. Since there are a couple to do it's not done but getting there.

Since I showed a bit of this area before,
here's a close to final version for comparison.

Continued, A short dev post about a tiny stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

I had a short break from working on this, while waiting for pico-8 0.1.4. In the meantime I had finished blocking in all the details of the narrative and how that all ties together. I planned a lot of levels on paper and graphed out some ideas for overall structure, and I've done a lot of other stuff that would spoil things if I posted about them at the moment.

Here's a less spoilery, vague, outdated graph diagram before I talk a bit about what I've been doing here.

The new version of pico-8 fixed some important issues regarding the character limitations (not that they exist or are low, but rather that there was memory corruption when you reached the boundaries. I spent around 99% of the time at the boundary for this game :p).

The new limit is 64k, with better token counting, which gives me a lot more space to work in with the code, technically. I might be able to bring back some screens or mechanics I removed for code space reasons but I'm not doing going to do that until the rest of the game is closer to done. What I am going to do is still work under the original 32k limit - but allow myself to code above the limit during active coding. Previously, I would just copy paste a section of the code I'm not working on out of the cart, then reduce the code size, and then bring it back in. This just eases workflow, which is great. There can also be less of this type of code while developing:

Aside from some minor wishlist things I was going to try and squeeze in I was pretty close to code complete anyway, so I want to limit the amount of adding I do until I really have to, and then spend the rest of the code on polish after that.

I'm currently trying to flesh out the levels needed for the narrative and gameplay. I'm debating whether I should go in order of progression, or try out "important" bigger ones with the purposes of making sure I can fit the key points in and then work backwards.

I haven't decided, so here is a wide-view teaser of a random level I'm currently working on, without any game context (so no real spoilers). Hopefully soon I'll have finished up the main levels and gotten some music in there (more on the music specifically in the next post).

(The filename says lvl-3, it's just the third image in that folder).

As mentioned, I am making a small stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

I've made quite a bit of progress today so here is a short gif. I now have all the systems in place, and can move on to finishing out the levels and narrative, and higher level ideas. Read more below for the gif and more info.

Follow my twitter or this blog (and soon I'll have a mailing list) for updates.
 

 
Here's the title screen again for bonus points.

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