week 1: microgames

week one! i pen-and-papered at our first meeting and came up with this samsara idea, where you were a soul being reincarnated and each microgame was like an animal life. then i didn't touch the game for like three days

since my theme was samsara naturally i got the idea that maybe there was some way you could achieve nirvana. so i decided that in each microgame you could collect "karma" and when you collected enough you reached nirvana and "finished" the game.

the first game i made was the frog one, in M's living room. actually originally the frog game was literally going to be a few seconds of frogger but when i was about to implement it i came up with the current idea which is much snappier and works better as a microgame. so

i got started with a tiny pico-8 template project M made. i stripped out most of it but their tween system saved my life. so useful! i learned a lot about how to structure pico-8 games... i'd played around in pico-8 but never really tried to make anything in it before

in the back of my mind i was worrying about... to show you were going through samsara, i thought i'd use some sort of spinning wheel transition between microgames. which i had no idea how i would do because it'd have to have a large sprite. but M's default transition system looked really good actually so i didn't need to worry about that

i knew creating large sprites would be time-consuming so instead i opted to use geometry draw functions (mainly a lot of rrectfill) to create the visuals. i like the style

in one day i made the bird game and the fly game. the bird game was one of the first microgame ideas — it's just re-flavored whack-a-mole. the fly was going to be some other animal... it only happened because i thought it'd be cute if there was a fly microgame since flies appear in the frog microgame. so the microgames would feel more connected. and then i thought of the flappy bird-esque mechanic and latched onto it

when designing minigames i tried to stay away from quick-time-event type stuff cause i know M doesn't enjoy them. the only microgame that requires quick reflexes is the bird one but it still has enough leeway imo. however because of genre legacy, i think, playtesters still tend to think the games are timed even though they're not. which is pretty funny

i worried a lot about microgame parsability, so every microgame has text prompts — a little like the intro text of warioware microgames — that help get you on your feet. i playtested with M and my roomy and worked out some kinks (arrow key inputs were unintuitive unless marked, while z button inputs were instinctual) until the learning curve felt right

after all that i composed music because i wanted to learn how to use the pico-8 tracker. i jammed out on piano for a bit and came up with something complicated that (1) was a pain to input into the tracker and (2) didn't sound great because pico-8's instruments are fuzzy and blend unpleasantly. so i came up with a repeating riff on my computer keyboard and used that as the base for the track instead. lesson learnt

the end-screen music i reused from a demo i had lying around. the way it swells and descends complements the end-screen animation which is unintentional but awesome. i really didn't know how to depict nirvana in the end-screen at first so i asked M what they thought and they coded out an animation in front of me in like five minutes. it was really impressive. i used it as a base so everyone say thank you M. thanks M ily M

pretty happy with how this came out it's cute. if i had to change stuff it'd be the tutorial text — i'd move the prompts into the background near the center of the screen so they're more immediately in focus. also i'd display input prompts over the things they affect rather than just at the bottom of the screen cause that was a point of confusion.

the fewest i've gotten is six lifetimes but it's definitely possible to do fewer