Did another room for the Caves of ZZT remix collab. This time I decided to make a room tie in with Z.U.T.S. (the “ZZT Underground Transit System”) from Best of ZZT, although in practice this plays similarly to the room its based on in Caves.
…and with that I think I’ll take a break from contributing to the collab and give other people the chance contribute (even you could contribute, person reading this post!).
enemy implementation has begun
the rude bunny on top of the players head is test enemy
Cannot believe you are making Landstalker
Joining the Pico-8 train:
after like 20 minutes of messing around i am pleased to announce my mareo clone, “Cubepillar”. plz look forward to it.
can we make sickos.png an official emote pls
the Terraria guys made bank remaking Minecraft in 2D. It’s time to go deeper.
It’s time for 1D Minecraft.
LINECRAFT
I realized that, so far, I’ve just been making a toy, and I need to add more depth and long-term objectives to make this a game. Part of that process means adding more variety to repetitive action, and one way to do that is with dynamic generation. I spent some time today implementing a randomized radio. Some test results:
EDIT: Hey, this screenshot demonstrated at least two bugs I’d missed! Time to fix those.
Neck deep in syntax-case right now. Literally writing syntax transformers to help me write syntax transformers.
i keep opening fruityloops and poking at my keyboard instead of doing anything else but i’m having fun so fuck it
(make-entity mecs-render
(list 'tilesheet kenny)
(list 'screen-pos (pt 50 50))
(list 'tilesheet-tile (pt 26 0))
(list 'z-index 5)
(list 'lifetime 0)
(list 'dt (lambda () *render-dt*))
(list 'circle 50 50 15 0.01))
(make-entity mecs-render
(list 'tilesheet kenny)
(list 'screen-pos (pt 150 150))
(list 'tilesheet-tile (pt 27 1))
(list 'z-index 5)
(list 'lifetime 0)
(list 'dt (lambda () *render-dt*))
(list 'circle 100 100 15 0.05))
(make-entity mecs-render
(list 'tilesheet kenny)
(list 'screen-pos (pt 150 150))
(list 'tilesheet-tile (pt 27 3))
(list 'z-index 5)
(list 'lifetime 0)
(list 'dt (lambda () *render-dt*))
(list 'circle 75 25 15 0.005))
;...
(let ((rendering-jobs '()))
(match (collect-systems mecs-render
tracks-lifetime-system
circulating-system
tilesheet-rendering-system)
[(list tl-ents circ-ents tsr-ents)
(do-tracks-lifetime tl-ents)
(do-circulating-system circ-ents)
(set! rendering-jobs (do-tilesheet-renderer tsr-ents rendering-jobs))
(do-render-jobs renderer rendering-jobs)]))
Fiat lux baby!
The ambition here is to take much of the structure of corpse wizard but totally separate out game logic from rendering logic.
In Corpse Wizard game logic and rendering logic coexisted in the same entity component system framework which complicated a lot of things. I have to say I’m disappointed in Chez scheme’s support for debugging macros - it seems like errors in macro-expansions don’t give good line number information which, to me, almost totally defeats the purpose of having macros.
Macros are mostly silly anyway but the one big thing I do feel is necessary is a pattern matcher so I ported shadchen over into syntax-case under the expectation that Chez would get this right. Apparently Racket is the only Scheme which really lets you propagate error message information through macro expansion. It makes me want to weep. Maybe after the bakedown I’ll port this stuff over to R6RS and then to Racket.
Back in the Corpse Wizard days I hacked into the guts of Gambit-C so that my pattern matcher could report line number information but I figured I wouldn’t have to do this again. I happen to know the main maintainer of Chez so maybe he can help me out.
I’M JUMPING INTO THE POOOOOOL
test: cycling through a randomly generated assortment of powerups
You dog! Have fun! 
Was my b-day over the weekend so I hung out with my sister and played some shmups instead of working on this.
I’m back on this bullshit though!
Also since this is the unofficial pico8 thread zep posted this today (the sliders on the bottom are new) and that’s very exciting for when I want to try pico8 music again!
game programming is awful lol
I was so unmotivated to implement collision detection and physics today that I got a dozen other things done instead
how i currently am with enemy AI
…and me, with object descriptions!
programmed this one-way shutter mechanism in zzt to avoid programming in real life:
i barely even have an idea for what kind of world to attach this to (a dungeons of zzt clone?)
Whatever this is it looks very cool/good.
