PIXBURGH, PIXELVANIA, 5/13/2023 - The city has fallen. The dead pixels have taken over. You can hear them growling all around you. They hide everywhere & pop out when you least expect it. They smell you, they get hungry. Hungry for pixel flesh. You can outrun 'em . . . for awhile. The longer you avoid them though, the faster & more determined they get. They got Spot, they got Dot, and now they're after me. I'm the last one left. Well, me & my buddy Point up in the tower. He's real good with fixin' stuff up, but parts & power are scarce. Every now & then he'll hit me on the radio with a new place to hide, or to let me know he's got a few seconds of juice for the lights & fences. Heck, sometimes he even rigs up a bomb for me to blast a few of the dead to oblivion! Just hoping it's enough. Hoping I can hold out long enough for them to give up & maybe take out a few along the way.
The Blocky Dead is a 64x64 timed survival game. Guide your pixel through the square, avoiding dead pixels for as long as you can. Use the helpers Point sends your way to hide from the dead pixels or take out as many as you can. Your initial goal is to survive for 10 minutes. Every game you survive the entire time bumps the time limit up by 5 minutes. See how long you can last and how many kills you can accumulate!
There are 4 powerups to use. Point will rig up a new one every 20 seconds of game time, but you never know which one he'll get working at any given time. When you have a powerup, it will appear in the time box at the bottom of the screen. Point won't give you a new powerup while you're already holding one. Here is how the powerups work:
I've been super sick for several days now, and I decided I was going to spend this day in bed making a game in a single day. I also decided that I wanted the player character to just be a pixel. I don't know where the zombie idea came from, but I suspect how I'm feeling right now played into it. Anyway, today kinda turned into my own imaginary game jam, and this is the result! I will probably end up tweaking this a bit, but I told myself I was going to post the "jam version" regardless, so I did.
All code and SFX by me. Music is also by me, but it's a riff on the theme from The Walking Dead by the excellent Bear McCreary. Cover art is a heavily edited version of the packaging picture from a kids' zombie Halloween costume. Pixels all pset by me :).
Thanks to everyone who played, the game just hit 1000 plays on the BBS as of 1/28/2024. Never expected my stupid little sick day game to end up being my most popular game :). Someone clued me in that a GIF of this was up on the PICO-8 Reddit (maybe I should join Reddit?), and another person did a Youtube playthrough, which is how I spotted the most recent bug :). Anyway, grateful to the PICO-8 community for giving my little time-wasters a shot.
1.3 - Fixed bug that let player button spam powers, but also caused player to lose the ability to move. Tradeoffs! (Also, thanks to everyone who's played for getting this to 1000 plays! Never expected that many)
1.2 - New power-up: proximity bomb. Also centered the game screen a bit better than it had been.
1.1 - Fixed bug where dead pixels could not kill player if player was hugging a wall
1.0 - Initial release