Ok, #TweetTweetJam is officially over so I'm going to talk about a few of my favourite games in no particular order.
I was going to do this earlier but when I went to the website to get a link I saw there had been some last minute additions which I wanted to play first (And I'm glad I did because one I found particularly entertaining)
A simple classic game but what sets this aside is the look of it. I'm a huge sucker for skeumorphism and this stimulates my Nokia neuron.
This game does some very clever things, such as using escape strings to poke into memory things that would normally take huge function call blocks, and putting the frame draw in a for loop to make shadows.
One thing which is hard to fit into 500 characters is charm. The games in this jam are simple by necessity so aspects such as personality are usually the first thing to go out the window.
Sneaky Kitty, through use of a simple shifting musical scale tied to the player input makes this the most charming game in the lineup.
Sure, its pong, big whoop, right? Except that in just 500 characters this has a computer opponent and absolutely wild graphical effects, with the fire and ice paddles igniting the trail on the ball to a beautiful streak across the board.
A good project to study if you want to learn about graphical effects in pico8
I'm told this is a demake of a mobile game but I've never played the original.
This does so many things well, from the uncluttered display to the control layout and the fact that the randomly generated notes always seem to sound good in any order.
It's not a rhythm game so theres no time pressure but it makes you want to play fast to see how it sounds.
A deceptively simple game about vore. Yes, you read that correctly.
That undulating tongue acting as a floor isn't just for decoration, the waves have a peristalsis motion, drawing other objects towards you. It gives great context to what would otherwise just be an abstract jumping game.
One of the ideas I had this year but didn't do was an Osmos demake, so I'm glad someone else took on the task of making big circle eat small circle.
The screen acts as an upper limit to how big you can get but the score counter goes to 4 decimal places so you can get a really accurate idea of how well you did.
Okay, so the gameplay is nothing special, but that kind of full screen scrolling animation and big scale graphics is rare in pico8, before you even get to the 500 character limit. I think theres some complex polar coordinate maths used to draw that star.
That's all my picks for #TweetTweetJam 9 but there's so much more to see.
There were 52 submissions this year and only 10 of them were mine. Pretty much all of them do something clever in the code so they're all worth looking at.
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