The Shindig: Getting to something that feels fun

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 3) I worked on getting the main screen rendered in PICO-8 as a sprite sheet and trying to reduce the size of my sprites.

I've often been told that a fun thing about working in the PICO-8 is that you can very quickly get to a prototype of the game that you can play test. Today I'd like to focus on getting to a version of the game that I can play test and see if it is actually fun.

Since I last posted I actually worked a bit more in the sprite editor to design some of the guests that can visit the hotel.

These are pretty cute so let's try getting them into the game screen. This is also prompting getting an idea of what the dynamics should be for each of the potential guest types.

I also listened to some of the excellent Eggplant - the secret life of games podcast; they have an episode for each of the UFO 50 games. In particular I listend to the episode for Party House and an episode where they interview the UFO 50 makers.

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First I want to be able to print text into the text box. The print function takes x and y coordinates. It also looks like future prints will follow on as new lines from the last print statement so it looks like I just need one to set the position of the text box and then I'm done.

-- this moves the print cursor to the right place for the start of the box
-- \0 to surprses newline
print("\0", 1 * 8 + 1, 12 * 8 + 1, 3)

Now the text is printed into the text box (with 1 pixel padding). I've also been able to use sspr from before to copy a 4x4 sprite onto the screen directly by setting width and height to 8*2. The second sprite sheet in the editor starts at y=8*4.

Now when you press the x button you can add a guest to the party! I've kept a space at the start for a future door / concierge.

And that is all I had time for today.