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 an animal life. animal theming was a good base to work off of so i gravitated toward it. since my theme was samsara, i wondered if there was some way you could achieve nirvana -- i decided in each microgame you collected karma, and when you collected enough you reached nirvana and "finished" the game.

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. it'd have to have a large sprite, which is difficult to make in pico-8. but M's default transition system looked really good right off the bat, so i didn't need to worry about that.

the frog microgame was the first one i made, in M's living room. originally it was going to be a few seconds of frogger... right before implementing it, i came up with the current idea, which i thought was much a snappier microgame concept. 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.

in one day i made the bird and fly microgames. the bird microgame was one of my first microgame ideas (it's just re-flavored whack-a-mole). the fly microgame 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 also appear in the frog microgame, and then the microgames would feel more connected. 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, which still has quite a lot of leeway. 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.

i wanted to learn how to use pico-8's tracker, so i composed music. 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 nice. 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

i'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. i'd also move the input prompts from the bottom of the screen (periphery) to be near the things they affect (in focus), since i think that lended toward confusion.

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