Instead of having UI, I added 🔴's tail to represent your hit points. This also gave the ball much more character and made the physics even more satisfying. It uses vector logic to simulate the tail's physics and is drawn using a series of enlarging circles.

Every level ends with this completely over-the-top animation where the level you're in gets sucked up into a ball, bounces down, and then releases into the new level. I tried caching every pixel on the screen but ran up against pico-8's memory limits, opting for storing 4x4 macro pixels instead 🤣.

I built the levels in the map editor, designing them with simplified 8x8 white sprites that then get blown up in 32x32 pieces of level geometry at run time. Likewise, this is how I placed the enemies and obstacles using their icons. If you load up the cart in pico-8 you can build your own levels!

Each level samples a row of colors in the game's sprite texture to determine the level's palette. This helped cut down on my symbol/token count since the data was stored in my sprite sheets rather than written out as tables in the code.

The checkpoint flag is also neat. The triangle shape is cut out by converging towards a point. Then pixels that are chosen to be drawn are offset by a sin wave. The checkboard colors are chosen by some modulo logic, something like when ((x/5-y/5)%2==1) draw green and otherwise draw white

An oddity of 🔴 is that it is best played on a keyboard, not a controller. The controls require you to constantly be pumping yourself up and down while also holding down left or right. You can't easily do this using an analog stick or d-pad, but it's pretty natural with a keyboard's arrow keys.

The game had humble beginnings as a simple physics toy of a bouncing ball with lots of squash and stretch. Unfortunately, later the ball had to be made smaller to support all the gameplay; at this size it was extra satisfying to bounce.

🔴, a #pico8 bounce shooter, is out now!
Play it in browser on itch: iansundstrom.itch.io/redcircle
Development fun facts itt 🧵

Going to release 🔴, a #pico-8 bounce shooter with mostly procedural animation and gfx, sometime this week!

Is there a #pico8 meetup at #gdc? I have like 4 games to show off if anyone is curious.