I’ve been working on some new features for my game, including buffs and cosmetics. I probably should have written more code by now, but unfortunately, my keyboard has other plans. 😭

Some of my keys, especially O, L, and 9, have stopped working properly, and the accent keys are also causing problems. Since I speak Portuguese, which uses accents quite a lot, writing has become a real challenge.

And programming without the letter O is surprisingly painful. For some reason, it’s EVERYWHERE in code! I keep finding different ways to type things and work around the problem, even though it’s making everything much slower.

I even tried using my phone as a Bluetooth keyboard. Hehehe. At this point, I’m improvising however I can! 😂

I’m really sad that I won’t be able to get a new keyboard or repair this one anytime soon, but I’m still trying to make progress with the tools I have. Hopefully, I can get back to coding normally soon.

I added the planets to my game! ☆ You can drag them around and place them wherever you want on the screen, and they also give you some buffs! I’m still figuring out how to organize everything, but I’m really loving how it’s turning out. It’s all so much fun!! ♡₊˚

I drew some planets to use as decorations on my website. I’m thinking about creating some buffs to add to the shop, so I’ll probably do that!

I’m making a little clicker game. That’s pretty much it!

Well, I’m working on what the little characters will look like. I took some inspiration from an asset I found online, so I’ll probably change it later. For testing purposes, I’ll stick with this one for now.

Today I built the foundation for the mining system! Pressing X lets you mine an ore, which shakes while it’s being mined and then drops a resource.

Right now, it only works with one ore, but I still need to add the rest, along with a proper inventory and collection system. I’m also thinking about creating a dedicated mining area for it.

I redrew the sprites for the ores and the items dropped by miners because, after the errors I discovered (which I talked about in the previous devlog), I had to redraw them since I’d lost everything luckily, I had a screenshot! =)

Today I found out that PICO-8 uses sprite sheets 2 and 3 to store the map data. So, if you make a really huge map, it uses those sprite sheets to store the map data.

And guess what? I was making a completely unnecessarily huge map and didn’t know about this, and then I hit Ctrl+S. So all the sprites I had on those sheets disappeared =( The ores and other stuff too =(

Thankfully, I have screenshots of them, so I’ll redraw everything. But honestly, this is starting to get traumatic 😭

I tried making the game’s sounds in PICO-8, but they turned out really bad, so I gave up on it for now.

Hey! Today I drew the ores and some of the resources for the game! These ores can be mined (obviously 🫠), and the player will be able to use them to craft different things. One of those things is repairing the spaceship so you can finally leave the planet lol.

The ores I made so far are Copper, Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, and Nickel, along with some special resources like Crystals, Stardust, Alien Scrap, and Oxy Fruit (which will have an important purpose later 👀).

These resources will naturally spawn around the map, and I also want to add a rarity system to them, so some resources will be harder to find than others. You’ll be able to use them for crafting and, eventually, for repairing and upgrading your ship.

I’m really liking how it’s turning out so far! =)
I think my next devlog will be about collecting and mining these resources hehe.

So, today I drew the rocket and started working on the Stardust logic; it’s going to be something that spawns on the map, and you’ll need to collect it to use the tools. The globe-like object will generate a breathable area since it’s an alien planet (though it’s still green right now, heh). I’m not sure how I’ll decorate the world; I’m really struggling with creativity. My references are great, but PICO-8 has limitations regarding colors and sprite counts. Plus, I’m short on time after all, the Stardance jam is coming to an end 🥹. I hope I can manage to deliver something good.

I made animations for the player well, I think they turned out good. Later, I’m going to redraw the spaceship and the map.

I’m redesigning the player, and while working on the animations, I watched a lot of videos on pixel art and animation techniques. Honestly, I can’t even believe I managed to pull this off, haha. Well, I have YouTube to thank for it! =)

I’m drawing other sprites, they look pretty bad right now, but I’m still going to improve them.

I designed a ship, well the game will be about you are lost on an alien planet very similar to Earth, I introduce the mushrooms, they are a test hehe, I also like the movement.

I’m trying to draw the sprites, honestly, pixel art is really difficult and tedious, especially with such limited colors. I really hope I can manage to create something. Fortunately, the game code is in Lua, which is a very easy language.

This was so difficult, seriously 😭 It’s really annoying having to do all of this, and it ended up misaligned too =( I hope I can fix it later. It looks like it’s going to take hours =/

This was really difficult but also really fun! I’m creating my Hackpad well, I think I am 😂. I honestly didn’t understand anything I was doing 🥀. I think it should work, though! This seems really cool, and I hope I can finish this project =D

DevLog #22

I finally got it working. I discovered the error was in how the commands were being loaded, since they were all being loaded from a “commands” folder via index.js, they were taking too long to respond; because of the response time limit, an error kept popping up. I managed to fix it, though, and now it works =) I also fixed some bugs in other commands.