Vacation is released! With clouds and fish!

With a luxurious 15 minutes to go before the Strawberry Jam 8 deadline, Vacation is released! There are now silhouettes of fish in the water, and clouds in the sky – the latter courtesy of pyrex & nyeo.

According to Shrinko-8, I’ve used 7498 tokens (92% of the limit), 36081 characters (55% of the limit), and 14704 characters compressed (94% of the limit) after “safe” minification. Without minification, it uses 119% of available compressed space, so Pico-8 wouldn’t allow exports; I prefer to leave code legible for curious passers-by but there isn’t an obvious satisfying alternative to minification here; I could refactor it as multi-cart (the text mode and the arcade mode can be separated!) but that’s more awkward to manage on things like small handheld systems.

While I don’t have more dev work on this version planned (unless folks run into bugs – very possible for a game jam game coming in hot), I will be writing some documentation: first, a summary of suggestions (round by round) for folks who want to verify that they’re okay with what the game will do; after that, docs on how to mod the game (especially how to write your own hypnotic scripts using this engine!) and the hypnotic techniques I used in its design (overt and covert) will be forthcoming.

I’d love to hear folks’ feedback. I’m proud of not only landing this in the quick schedule of the game jam, I actually got all the way into the nice-to-haves (with a little help – I wasn’t going to get the clouds looking that good or the music sounding reasonable at all on my own!) and it doesn’t feel too sparse. The end-of-game screen is a bit naff but it’s serviceable.

Oh, if you want an actual dexterity challenge, try to score 0%. It’s possible to gain momentum beyond the normal jump height with good rhythm; you might need that technique to avoid touching targets at the water’s surface if you’re going for a 0% run. Good luck!

Of course, being zonked out of your mind probably doesn’t make it any easier. Sorry. (not sorry.)