Save Picoville

Oh no! Picoville is under attack! Fight back the mutants and save the townspeople.

A demake of Save New York for the Commodore 64; my first Pico 8 game.

OVERVIEW OF GAME:

Waves of alien mutants are descending upon Picoville. As these creatures fly around, every now and then one will land on a building and begin to eat it. Sometimes one will lay an egg which falls to the ground and hatches into a subterranean "mutant junior." This very dangerous creature inhabits the city's subways and sewers, and will eat a building from the bottom, causing a lot of damage. Your job is to "Save Picoville" by getting rid of all the airborne and underground mutants before they have eaten the entire city.

HOW TO PLAY: 

You use the joystick to fly your player around the sky and blast the flying aliens or to maneuver your player through the subway searching out and eliminating mutant juniors. Be careful you don't get run over by a subway train while you are underground, or crash into anything while you are in the sky! Watch your fuel consumption too, and be sure you refuel yourself by intercepting the fuel parachute before you run out.

When you have killed all the mutants in a wave, you have saved Picoville and the round ends. You then go onto the next level of difficulty where you have to do battle against ever increasing numbers of aliens. The game ends when you have used up all 3 of your plays.

SCORING: 

• 20 points for each flying mutant hit.
• 50 points for shooting a mutant's egg before it hatches.
• 90 points for each underground mutant hit.
• You get 400 gallons of fuel each time you refuel.
• You have to kill 10 mutants to save New York in the first round.
• Add 16 more mutants for each higher level.
• 10 points for each building brick which remains intact at the end of each round.
• 1 extra play awarded for each 1000 points earned.

CONTROLS: 

The joystick moves your player left, right, up, and down. Watch out how gravity and inertia affect your airplane while you are flying! Landing pads at the left and right edges enable you to land your plane and go down underground, or to come out from underground and take off again, by moving the joystick up or down. The fire button fires a shot in the direction you are going.

DEV BLATHER:

This is an I-want-to-learn-Pico-8 demake of an old Commodore 64 fav, Save New York (original manual cribbed above). A simple but satisfying li'l shooter, I found myself playing this a lot as a kid, even if it was just to methodically blow up all the buildings. I think the unique movement was part of the satisfaction of the original, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to match that mechanic. 

The Commodore version had a larger maze of tunnels at the bottom that you would traverse as the tiny man sprite, chasing "mutant juniors" that drop from the flying aliens. I never found this much fun, so I was fine with stripping this down to fit into a single Pico 8 screen. You can still use the one-level subway to duck down and shoot mutant juniors while dodging the train, so I hopefully kept some of the spirit of the original. I do like the variation of gameplay mechanics on a single screen, it's an interesting idea.

I resisted embellishing and stuck to the simplicity of the C=64 version for Pico 8, but I've been building out a more complicated and increasingly weird variation for Playdate.

My original idea was to make the tunnels almost a separate game, where you'd descend through a portal at the bottom, and suddenly be in a traditional platformer mode. There'd be some task you had to do below the city, then return to the plane. I still love the idea, but it also seems kinda nuts. But hey, if it works for Blaster Master...

I did all the sound effects and "music." Pico 8 has some built-in tools that are right up my alley being a big nanoloop fan. I watched various tutorials by Gruber which were super helpful.  

Post on Lexaloffle BBS