PiCoSteveMo

Yesterday I learned of the PiCoSteveMo game jam on Topic Lords and was immediately inspired to have a go taking part.

The premise is that you make a PICO-8 game inspired by a Steven King work over the course of November.

This will be my first game on the PICO-8. I've had a go with making games with PICO-8 after hearing how great it is for having a quick feedback loop and forcing you to keep things simple.

When I've played with it in the past I've still felt overwhelmed by how open it is. You start with methods like RECTFILL but without a clear idea of what you want to make it's hard to know hard to move past drawing rectangles to the screen.

The idea

I'm going to try and make a game inspired by The Shining. I've not read the novel (maybe now is a good opportunity) but I've enjoyed the film several times.

The game will be called "The Shindig" and it will draw inspiration from the UFO 50 game Party House. The game is a deck builder where you try to host the coolest possible party without it getting too out of control.

The mechanics are simple enough and the original is playable with a restricted controller so this should be doable.

Scaling the user interface down to 128x128 resolution will be interesting and I look forward to learning about the music system.

Having a look at some of the previous submissions to this game jam I doubt I will be able to achieve the same level of polish, but I am looking forward to learning a lot in the process.

Wish me luck!