The Shindig: Getting acquainted with the sprite editor

As part of the PiCoSteveMo game jam I'm building a deck builder game where you host a great party.

The last time (see day 2) I worked on getting an initial design for the main game screen in Aseprite. This time I'll have a go using the PICO-8 sprite editor to recreate it in the game.

Initially I directly imported the whole 128x128 screen into the PICO-8 sprite editor. but it turns out that is the memory I have for all sprites!

Still it's nice to be able to print the entire roof directly from the sprite sheet.

sspr(0, 8, 8 * 16, 8, 0, 0, 8 * 16, 8)

I get the feeling I'm going to get very good at multiplying numbers by 8 and 16. 8 is the number of pixels in a tile and 16 is the number of pixels in a row.

So I need to get creative in paring this size down. First of all it looks like Aseprite has a tilemap export removed any duplicates. This brought the size down by three quarters but I think we need to make it smaller still.

Playing around with painting on the screen it looks like I can directly print a plain background for the sky using rectfill.

-- night sky
rectfill(0, 0, 8 * 16, 15, 1)

And similarly we can model the stars as 1x1 rectangles.

-- stars
rectfill(3, 7, 3, 7, 10)
rectfill(12, 5, 12, 5, 10)
rectfill(20, 2, 20, 2, 10)

For the roof it's mostly one row of the same sprite

-- draw roof second row
for x = 0, 16 - 1 do
  spr(21, x * 8, 8)
end

I don't like how I'm making lots of hard coded references, but maybe this is the feeling of liberation?

I can apply the same approaches for the rest of the screen and now our sprite sheet is looking a bit cleaner. I probably don't need most of these brick sprites either.

I found one more method that saved me some time for the text box border (except I did it the long way first already, whatever).

There is a rounded rectangle function, which with a radius of 1 pixel will render our border.

rrectfill(
  8 - 2,      12 * 8 - 2, -- x, y
  14 * 8 + 4,  3 * 8 + 4, -- w, h
  1,                      -- radius
  13                      -- colour
)