[RELEASE] Batman Loves Him A Parallelogram

[RubixsQube]

UPDATE:

 

THE GAME IS DONE. After a bit of time trying to figure out how to get it on itch.io to begin with, it's been uploaded to the Wizard Jam. And it features fun local co-op competitive gameplay. And also a bunch of art that I like, because we got oeuvres to consider. Sorry if you don't have another person to play the game with. 

 

 

(Also, there's a pretty innocuous easter egg / secret code in there somewhere.)

 

 

 

 

 

So. I've done this twice before to like, middling success, and I wanted to try and make another game for this 4th Wizard Jam, but this time, instead of using Lua/Love, I'm going to do this in Pico8, which also uses Lua, but has a better editor for cute pixel art and music. Starting with a new language is perhaps silly, as it's like reinventing the wheel. BUT WHATEVER, LET'S MAKE AN ATTEMPT. It's comforting to know that, like all of the other times, the actual game designer wizards on this forum will just blow me out of the water, either way. 

 

I've decided to go with the title of Idle Thumbs 273, or at least the first half of title for Idle Thumbs 273, "Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram." 

 

 

The title refers to Batman Loves Him a Criminal, combined with weird discussion of parallelograms (in regards to Quadrilateral Cowboy) at the beginning of the episode. I don't really have a game idea as of now, but I did figure out how to get a little animated Batman to walk around and jump into the air. 

 

(side question, are animated gifs not allowed to be embedded into posts anymore? That's disappointing.)

 

I need to figure out the game, I think. But I want to make sure that I have my movement physics down. Maybe Batman can throw batarangs. All in the service of loving some parallelograms, I suppose. 

 

[ke51n]

Batman! 

[Travis]

I like your little Batman in pico-8!

 

I am still able to upload animated gifs with the "Drag files here to attach or choose files..." thing below each post. Then click on the image to insert it at your cursor. If that doesn't work for you, that is weird.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Good Batman, I hope you make a tiny Pico8 dating sim about Batman trying to find a parallelogram to love.

 

Also I don't know about external links, but if you just upload the gif to the post itself then the gif does seem to work.

[Wyatt_AK]

Anything with Batman can take my hypothetical money.

[nkornek]

  On 11/22/2016 at 12:42 PM, SuperBiasedMan said:

Good Batman, I hope you make a tiny Pico8 dating sim about Batman trying to find a parallelogram to love.

 

Yes please.

[RubixsQube]

So, I think that perhaps I want to make a fun weird multiplayer game. I may need to fumble with the sprites later, but for right now, the game allows for two players to skitter around a parallelogram. At the moment, we've got Batman, and we've got the Penguin (and we have some penguin spectators). I am thinking that maybe if Batman gets the parallelogram into the goal zone, he gets points that go up, but the Penguin can either get the parallelogram in his own goal zone for like, 3/4ths of the points that Batman does, or he can chase after and touch Batman (I'm currently working on little hearts to animate on a touch between Batman and parallelogram, or Batman and Penguin) for points also. I do like the idea that the Penguin player has two potential points-scoring conditions.

 

However, this is slow going because coding video games is hard.  

[z_bill]

Yes! I love the look! Really great to see someone using Pico-8 (is this a first for wizard jam?).

[RubixsQube]

  On 11/27/2016 at 6:54 AM, z_bill said:

Yes! I love the look! Really great to see someone using Pico-8 (is this a first for wizard jam?).

 

I don't know! I can't remember seeing any, but it's been really fun to use Pico-8, even if it's not super well documented. 

 

Last night I implemented a scoring component, and I've been futzing with the physics so that it's more fun for the parallelogram to slide around when hit, increasing the bounce off the walls. 

 

I am having some trouble with getting the hearts to appear when Penguin and Batman touch, though. I have the heart sprite, and I can trigger a sound effect (and points) when they touch, but it's a little weird trying to get the heart sprite to appear in a particular position, and then disappear after a bit of time. The way that Lua and Pico-8 work is that there is an init function, an update function, and a draw function. The program starts by running things from the init function, then it goes through the update function every frame, and then uses the draw function to draw that frame. So you have to set a bunch of cooldown timers to make sure that things trigger and then can't immediately retrigger on the next frame, and that means you have to keep juggling cooldown timer re-initilizations everywhere. It's a hassle. 

 

Because of the lack of good tutorials, I have been mostly coding by finding other examples of Pico-8 games online, and then finding how they might do something. But this is non-ideal since it can become a real chore to hunt through and find exactly what I'm looking for. 

 

Ugh, but at least as of right now, I have a game, even if it's way overly simplistic. When working on Wizard Jam games, I start by trying to get some form of a game done, and then I spend a bunch of time adding features and tightening up the mechanics and game art. 

 

I do like Pico-8, since it makes the art and music creation really fun, but I just wish that Wizard Jam didn't always come at a time when I am also the most busy person ever! 

 

[SuperBiasedMan]

There was a book bundle recently that had a couple Pico8 zines in it with tutorials and explanations of how stuff worked. If you want I could send those on to you? I haven't given them much of a look yet, as I'm working in Unity, but they might help.

[RubixsQube]

Oh, that would be really amazing if you had those handy somewhere. I have a plane ride tomorrow, and I'd love to have some reading material. I think that, from here on out, I'm going to try using Pico-8 for my Wizard Jam entries, I've decided. 

[RubixsQube]

Thanks for the zines, SuperBiasedMan! 

 

I got the little hearts to work when Penguin or Batman touch, and I also have been futzing with how the game looks. I've got little penguins on all sides (I think that I'll have them animate in the final version, if I have the time. But for now, I think that I need to find someone else here to test the multiplayer balance locally. 

 

Oh, ALSO I have added little sound effects, which I'll keep secret until final release. 

 

 

[RubixsQube]

Quick sneaky update that I won't talk too much about: 

 

A friend (and forum-member) mentioned that the other half of the episode title is "I Considered an Oeuvre" and mentioned a way I can work that in, so I've been making these little pico-8 recreations:

 

 

and it is...so fun. 

[theschap]

Hah, so good!

[Nappi]

  On 11/29/2016 at 4:39 PM, RubixsQube said:

 

 

 

Niiice!

[brendonsmall]

[RubixsQube]

So, as of tonight, I have the game just about done, including the interstitials. I've even added music!

 

Right now, it's a two player local competitive game. I don't know if it's balanced (at all), and if someone wants to help with that, I can upload an as-is version of the game for people to play. 

 

I've also made cover art:

 

[RubixsQube]

I finished the game! You can find it here. It's good for if you have a second person who you care about and you want to learn about kissing and batman and art. 

[rzbone]

This is great! Stylish art and was really funny to play.

[Patrick R]

What a fun game. Pico-8 seems like a pretty cool thing.

[********]

I enjoyed playing this, and I enjoyed considering some oeuvres which I would not have done had I not be entreated to do so.

[atte]

  On 11/27/2016 at 5:15 AM, RubixsQube said:

I am thinking that maybe if Batman gets the parallelogram into the goal zone, he gets points that go up, but the Penguin can either get the parallelogram in his own goal zone for like, 3/4ths of the points that Batman does, or he can chase after and touch Batman (I'm currently working on little hearts to animate on a touch between Batman and parallelogram, or Batman and Penguin) for points also. I do like the idea that the Penguin player has two potential points-scoring conditions.

 

Having this kind of asymmetric scoring system/ different goals for the players in a really simple arcade game is really interesting!

+ A chip version of the moody Batman theme melody was a fun idea.

[RubixsQube]

  On 12/5/2016 at 3:21 AM, rzbone said:

This is great! Stylish art and was really funny to play.

 

Thank you! I appreciate that. 

 

  On 12/9/2016 at 10:46 PM, Patrick R said:

What a fun game. Pico-8 seems like a pretty cool thing.

 

It actually really is. While you could do even the coding in the built-in editor, I did my coding in ATOM, but otherwise, the art, music, and map-creation were all done with the editor. The music, in particular, was fun. I had to go and find sheet music for some of the music I put in, and then I transcribed it to the chip-tune editor. I was pretty happy that SuperBiasedMan also forwarded me some Pico-8 zines. I think that my future Wizard Jam entries will likely use Pico-8, I may have actually settled on a game tool that I really like. 

 

  On 12/9/2016 at 11:05 PM, kickstandcarp said:

I enjoyed playing this, and I enjoyed considering some oeuvres which I would not have done had I not be entreated to do so.

 

You should look up the artists I included in the game if you're more interested in any of them! I tried to be as diverse in artist selection as I could, which meant I ended up maybe being more biased towards modern art (which is fine). It was really fun for me to mock up those tiny little paintings. 

 

  On 12/9/2016 at 11:45 PM, atte said:

 

Having this kind of asymmetric scoring system/ different goals for the players in a really simple arcade game is really interesting!

+ A chip version of the moody Batman theme melody was a fun idea.

 

I'm actually pretty interested in seeing people actually playing this competitively. (To be quite fair, it'll be fun seeing Chris/Nick/Jake playing this). I don't know if there are a lot of asymmetric cooperative games, and I wonder how one could be tuned to be fun for both parties. 

 

Thanks everybody! 

[Nappi]

I like the pixel art a lot, and the consider the oeuvre bits were brilliant! I can't say much about the gameplay because I tested it alone, but it seems like it might be quite interesting.

 

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose "ESDF" instead of "WASD" for the control scheme? I did not pay attention to the control screen, and for a while, thought that the controls were somehow bugged.

[RubixsQube]

  On 12/23/2016 at 9:12 AM, Nappi said:

I like the pixel art a lot, and the consider the oeuvre bits were brilliant! I can't say much about the gameplay because I tested it alone, but it seems like it might be quite interesting.

 

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose "ESDF" instead of "WASD" for the control scheme? I did not pay attention to the control screen, and for a while, thought that the controls were somehow bugged.

 

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked the oeuvre portions. As for ESDF, it's the default key mapping for the second player in Pico-8 for some reason? I know it's annoying, but I couldn't figure out how to change it on the HTML version.