Nice game! I used Pico-8 too, your art kind of blows mine out of the water. The only glitch I found was that I got stuck in the bar, going out the front door puts you behind some fence. I'm not sure how I got out but I did.

What a lovely art style, interesting take on the theme too haha. The first few dialogs actually really drew me into the game and story you were telling. But after a marathon coding session, I'm a tad burnt myself so I didn't read all of it after a few long dialogs.

I got stuck in the construction worker asking for a drink, so I'm afraid that's where I stopped for this time. Great game style, loved it! Good job on completing!

Actually, I played it one more time. Finished it this time. Lovely, well done. Great art style, just enough sound effects to keep it poppin. Good storytelling, well done.

@bobotast @bjeaurn Glad you both enjoyed it! I'm not sure what happened with the bar but it's definitely something to look into.

Secret level?


@avsc I hope you don't mind me going into a bit of technical detail here, because how you ended up seeing that is quite fascinating IMO.

PICO-8 is special in that the bottom half of the map, and the bottom half of the spritesheet, occupy the same area of memory. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem, as the game map fits neatly into the top half of the map and I only used half the spritesheet.

However, for some reason, the palette-swapping trick I use for my logo screen no longer seems to work in Google Chrome. So I had to physically draw three logo sprites and switch between them, and that meant going onto the second half of the spreadsheet, which in turn drew that garbage data onto the map.

...and normally, *that* wouldn't have been a problem either, but I forgot to turn on the collision detection for the traffic cones, which (I'm assuming) is how you were able to glitch out of bounds and see that! I've patched the collision detection now.

Great idea for a game! It has great dialogue and was an easy enough game to play. One thing I've noticed is that the collisions are off. Once I got stuck in a roadblock and had to restart. Other than that, it's a great game!

Neat game. It was quite calming to walk around and just chill. Is it possible to help feed the birds or find bottlecaps? Because I seemed to miss that.
Also I found a cool portal:


same with @jefvel

@gullyngames That's in the "Known Bugs" list, I had a crack at fixing it but haven't been able to work out an approach that doesn't just break the collisions even further. You should still be able to move away from whatever wall or object you got stuck on, though.

@jefvel No, it isn't. I might implement those as additional sidequests in a post-jam update. And thank you very much for the gif! I've had other people report that glitch but this is the first time I've been able to see it in action. I'll see if I can patch that tomorrow.

Game was nice. Love the art style and the concept behind virtual consoles, and you did make a good use. Cheers!

Great idea for the theme. I couldn't come up with anything either and this would have been me as well! Art looked nice and I liked the story line.

Loved this game!!! Graphics are great, sound effect too :D And remember next time on ludum dare 46, that useless piece of trash can help you for making an idea :3

Love this, and the message behind it! :thumbsup:

Super cute game! I'm a big fan -- the only issue is that I couldn't seem to go into any of the buildings so I couldn't finish the game. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I couldn't walk through the doors and pressing Z wouldn't let me in either...

Most adorable game with a hint of meta! I absolutely love the art style, it makes the world of the game work in these tiny dimensions just right. The texts were light and cheeky as well!

Similar problem to @stefanie-leitch but otherwise a really nicely done (and rather meta) game. Looks like you probably need to normalize your input vector since you move faster going diagonally than horizontal/vertical (though perhaps that may not be a trivial thing on the PICO-8. I haven't attempted to use it. :wink: ) The art was pretty well done given the limitations and my only real nice-to-have suggestion would be some background music, though being a jam game and all, I can totally understand why there is none.

Nice use of the theme. This definitely captures that pre-jam brainstorming feel: "How about this? No, that's silly. But it's actually kind of cool..." I always love seeing all the unique directions everybody takes with their games.

@stefanie-leitch @guitarbro Whoops! My collision "fix" broke the doors! I've patched that now, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

And yeah, diagonal movement is too fast, but that wasn't high on my list of priorities and I didn't want to have to deal with the headache of non-integer-based movement >.< As you can see, I have enough problems with collision detection already!

@f1krazy lol yeah, I don't blame you. Sounds like quite the challenge.

Hey I saw your announcement post! It's really cool to see you went from a console to this, this was a surprisingly full and interactive world. I was happy to find someone by a pond, really thought she would be a classic fisherman and ended up being the funniest NPC. I think a little more handholding might be necessary to motivate the player but the experience bar grows appropriately to encourage you down the right path. This is a streamlined modern take in a retro platform and I like it!

I really liked the sound of entering or leaving a building. Made me jump by first and each time. Nice graphics, would like to see more interaction.

So, hey, nice to see Vance make his come-back.

I thought it was a well made game.

Rarely I think mise en abyme games are to be made, usually they are "too much". But htis one's humble and simple, I liked it.

What could have been cool is that the list we have by pressing B (that I discovered at the end, unfortunately) we could have ideas and not the stuff we have.

Overall, this felt tinier and with way less tension (and thus implication, in a way) than your previous entry that I loved so (15min to live). But it has its style too in a way.

And also, I didn't have any music, was it intended?

Thanks for the feedback, all!

@pl4typus This is indeed smaller and more relaxed, but I like it that way. I feel it contrasts nicely with *15 Minutes to Live*, rather than having the same tension. As for music, I completely ran out of energy towards the end of the 48 hours and simply didn't want to try messing around with PICO-8's music tracker.

Great little game! I was struggling to come up with an idea for LD45 for much of the first day (and at some point actually considered making a game about the writer's block), so I can totally relate to the story. I also love the colorful art style and the fact you made this in Pico-8!

Really nice art, had a few glitches but very nice!

A nice looking game, for sure, and a nice twist on the theme. I ran into some different bugs than most people:
* Trying to talk to the guy in the janitor place, with the bottle caps, locks up the game without displaying any text, until you press Z again; it's like you're talking to him but it doesn't show his text.
* Once you get to the end screen, if you press Z before it's done fading in, it locks up completely; I was able to eventually get it to precede by hitting Z several more times, not exactly sure what was up with that.
Other than that, it's a neat idea. good work!

A good use of PICO-8. I like how you used the theme to build the game — you took a philosophical approach. I think music would add a lot to this game. Even so, this is definitely one of the better entries here. Keep up the good work.

@philomory Thanks for reporting those! They should be easy fixes.

I think the first glitch is because the janitor is coded as an NPC but has no dialogue, so the game initiates an empty conversation instead. The second is because I forgot to disable the Z key (and probably also the X key) once the wipe to black starts! Whoops!

Nice. :D This was very fun, I love it. It's predictable, but in a really pleasing way and didn't bother me in the slightest. Great job with the PICO-8 palette as well, some of the little details like the shading on the traffic cones and the whole lemonade stand look really nice. I do wish the notepad was used a little bit more, but I'm sure you didn't exactly have a lot of time for that.

Great job!

Cute little sidequest-style game! It's interesting to have trading sidequests that ultimately just result in passing inspiration rather than some sort of item or ability.
Graphics looked nice, though music would have been nice to have.
Also, friendly reminder that some European keyboards find ZX controls to be unwieldy since Z and Y are swapped, just for future reference!

The game was nice, but it's a shame you didn't end up using one of the ideas proposed in the game, some of those sounded really neat, ahah.

Nice work!

@selkkie Thanks for the feedback! I came up with the ideas in the game as I went along, it wouldn't have made sense for me to switch to one of them from what I was already doing. It would have been way too late :P

Regarding the ZX thing, the controls are baked into the PICO-8 game engine and I can't change them, unfortunately. *However*, your comment reminded me that CV and NM will do the same thing as ZX, so I'll be sure to list those as alternate controls in future Ludum Dare entries. Thanks for the heads-up!

I really liked the story and the use of the theme in this game. It could have used some music to accompany me on the journey and keep the silence away. I also ran into a couple of glitches - got completely stuck in the park as the arrow keys stopped working - maybe because I didn't remember which key was for inventory and I tried a few out. I had to restart the game there.

But, I enjoyed playing it - and the ending made it all come together in a nice way. Great work!

Excellent meta game!!!!!
Excellent graphics and polished gameplay!
A game just the right size, not too small but no too large so the player abandon it :smile:
Big plus the well written dialogs with the various npcs!
An excellent entry!!

Awesome little game, I like that it's meta-y with how the character made the game I was playing.
I like the dialogues and the small stories the NPCs have to tell, and they shape the world a bit, even though it's only so small. Really nice!