[RELEASE] The Clone Progenitor

[Ash_NR]

Really late in getting my dev log up.

But here I am, I am basing my jam game of Episode 247 of Idle Thumbs, The Clone Progenitors. Although not part of the official diversifiers, I am using these ones from the short list for my own motivation:

·         The classics: Create a version of an old game, eg. checkers, poker, backgammon. Add twists if you want, but there’s more to these games than you might think.

·         Hard mode - Learn a new engine/IDE by making your first game using it during the jam.

Hard mode is me using Pico-8 for the first real time in actually making something. This has actually proven to be more difficult than I thought. It's implementation of Lua is a bit rougher than the standard, and so my code has been far less flexible than I'd like.

As for the classics, I've decided to meld the awesome bean-moving game Mancala, and Tharsis which was discussed in that episode. The game follows mancala in that seeds need to be sent to put into a scoring modules, they are the left-most and right-most circles in the screenshots below.

Where it differs from Mancala is that it is only a single player game. The conflict comes from random "events" like Tharsis, modules will become compromised and all "seeds" will need to be moved along to a different module otherwise they all will perish. Get as many seeds on to the scoring modules to evacuate them from the ship.

As of right now I've got the basic rules of Mancala in the game. I am still working on balancing random events, and how to repair modules.

And I really need to work on making stuff pretty!

[Ash_NR]

This jam was very much a head down get stuff down jam. Diving deeper into Lua than I have before, and ever with Pico-8, I really miss a heavily typed language. I struggled to keep my code clean for a bit, undoing some lazy hacks. But I was very happy with how easy I got a simple but effective state machine going. I wasn't able to get a nice animation going for all the movement in the game, so that is far more static than I liked. But I did manage to put in highlight functionality that shows what "that" move would actually do.

So I am going to call this release a release, it still needs sound and music, but the loop is there and I think Mancala really works with this theming.

You can find the game here

https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-4/rate/101679

[Ben X]

I had no idea what I was doing, but I really like the Ridley Scott's Alien UI vibe, and I managed to rescue 31 clones!