It’s about time I showed off my game here. Slaint is my ultimate TIC-80 game, a new simple classic-style puzzle game with several gamemodes. I’ve been developing this since last year, though the development schedule has pretty much just been “2 multi-day sprints where I did a ton of work in August last year and June this year with almost nothing in between and since.”
Anyways, here’s a 10 minute video showing off almost everything I have so far:
I still want to do a bit more before I release a public demo, mainly just fixing up bugs, making promo art, and making sure that if I release the demo, I won’t spend another few months doing absolutely nothing until I actually finish the game.
But at least so far, I think I’m well on my way to making one of the best TIC-80 games.
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nice work! it looks great. how did you like working in TIC-80? the only other fantasy console i know a little about is PICO-8. have you used PICO-8 as well? how do the experiences compare?
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For the most part, I think working with TIC-80 has been pretty nice. I appreciate its limitations, and how I must be creative in working around them to make something like this.
I am pushing TIC-80 a bit far here however so it isn’t exactly the most authentic development experience. This is mainly with how I code the game, which I do through an external text editor (TIC-80 has a version that allows this) on a single file (TIC-80 doesn’t let you load multiple files in 1 cartridge unlike PICO-8) with ~4500 lines of code. …so its a bit of a mess code-wise. Thankfully, all the assets are bundled into the file in a really efficient way, and I edit those through TIC-80’s own sprite and sound editors. As a result, this build of the game is under 180KiB! (though this is just the game file, not including TIC-80 itself)
I have worked a little with PICO-8 in the past, and while I did enjoy it, it is definitely more limiting than TIC-80 in a way that turned me off a little. In some ways, programming is a bit nicer in PICO-8 since you can divide your code among different tabs inside the program itself (TIC-80 has no such feature) as well as use an external editor with multiple files (though I haven’t tried this, and in fact didn’t know it had this capability until I looked it up just now. Maybe I should try it…). My main issue with programming something like this in PICO-8 would be the fact that PICO-8 only interprets Lua, unlike TIC-80 which supports a lot of different languages. As OK as Lua is, a lot of the complexity in my game (primarily with all the animation) is managed through complex data structures which I organize with Python’s dicts, lists, and classes. Lua only has tables (I am aware more complex structures are possible, however they are not built in), which would make things harder. Another big issue I have with PICO-8 has to be its palette. As iconic as it is, I do not like the PICO-8 palette, and there is no way to switch it out unlike in TIC-80 (but even if I couldn’t do so, I’d still prefer TIC-80’s default palette).
In terms of my own personal experience, I think working in PICO-8 was nice. I made a game where I wasn’t as concerned about color and therefore the palette didn’t matter. It was a good enough experience, although since it was so long ago I don’t remember the exact details of how it went. I do remember more recently working in PICO-8 and struggling to make something decent looking, but maybe I should try it out some more now that I know it supports external text editors.
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