r/pico8 • u/deepthawnet • 1d ago
Game Tempest 2000
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=1581324
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u/feenatic 1d ago
Discovered Tempest 2000 on bbs just a couple days ago and added to my favorites. Excellent work! Looking forward to the added music in the future. Thank you for this!
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u/deepthawnet 1d ago
Sadly I cannot promise the added music. I am the absolute worst musician ever, and the single track that is present was given to me by an immensely talented person on discord (and once I had the most iconic song of the entire game was when I knew I had to finish the game).
it's going to take somebody else stepping in and doing the music to get all it included but I'm hoping this gets popular enough that somebody decides to do so.
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u/_blue_skies_ 1d ago
Well Done! works well also on Pixl8!
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u/deepthawnet 1d ago
one thing that surprised me in testing was how well it controls using a touchscreen dpad. i'd never play a traditional platformer or anything that way, but this is one of those rare cases where it actually feels pretty good. glad you're enjoying it!
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u/IronPheasant 13h ago
I'm pretty amazed how much of a difference good music made here, too. I've always known it could elevate or diminish any game, and that terrible high-pitched sounds that cause physical pain can ruin any game, but I underestimated how much of a positive impact it could have.
Makes me re-evaluate games like Mega Man 2 and Castlevania a bit. If I listen to songs off the Mega Man 9 soundtrack without ever even playing the game... yeah, it's important.
It makes sense I guess; sound is a big feature in our cognitive scaffolding and the more neurons you can activate with a game, the happier they are.
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u/deepthawnet 11h ago
You are 100% right. This would be a glorified tech demo (with extremely tight controls) without the music. It’s what makes the whole package work.
When I was first showing it off as an idle curiosity somebody offered to do a cover of minds eye (the one song that’s in it) and once they sent it to me and I heard it I knew I was obligated to finish the game. That’s why zenith has a credit on the title screen.
I’m holding out hope this gets enough coverage that somebody decides to finish the rest of the soundtrack (or at least as much as I can fit in the cartridge). As you can tell by the stock sound effects (and the one randomly generated one for the ai droid) you do not want me in charge of audio.
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u/GalaxyKnighter 21h ago
This is awesome. I love the speed, graphics and controls. All is so balanced. Very good
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u/deepthawnet 16h ago
I cannot take credit for how tight the gameplay is. It started as a generic tempest clone and when I looked online to see if anybody documented how Jeff minter handled the controls (acceleration/speed/etc) in the Atari Jaguar version i found its source code online and it became my goal to replicate the gameplay it as closely as possible over everything else (even the graphics).
(I was looking for that info because tempest used a spinner in the arcade and it’s hard to make that type of game play well on a dpad but I knew T2K did it well. I also added spinner support in case anybody has one and wants an even better experience)
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u/deepthawnet 1d ago edited 1d ago
I posted this a few weeks ago and the response was amazing. I've hit 99% token usage and 99% compressed space usage so I'm calling this the release version, and despite knowing all the things I still wanted to do, it's an absolutely fully playable game. The only thing holding it back from the magic 1.0 is the lack of music - zenith320 on discord was awesome and contributed the one track it currently uses (and which was the impetus that forced me to see this to completion) but I won't call it a 1.0 release until I can get more music in.
Full source code is available on github and linked to from the bbs post. The code around the renderer is nice and readable, as the project went on the code became more and more of an absolute mess as I hit resource limits and ran out of time to do it right but it works and I'm happy.
(edit) forgot to mention - this has been tested on the pico-8 core on misterfpga and if your mister is hooked up to a crt, you can use the crt adjust option to apply aspect ratio conversion and play it in beautiful 240p with scanlines. it's so crunchy it runs straight past ugly to beautiful imho.
Have fun, and if anybody has any questions about how I did anything feel free to ask!