This game is now what I had hoped it would be! Big thanks to the community for the art advice, and code fixes, and honest opinions.
HOW TO PLAY:
Button 1 to jump
Button 2 to peck
The regular peck strikes at an angle and give Poulet greater velocity, to allow jumping father. HOLD UP while pecking to do a "soft" peck, where your regular jump arc is not changed, for precise and controlled attacks. HOLD DOWN while pecking to do a vertical peck, to avoid flying off a ledge during an attack.
Every third balloon popped has a prize-- the first prize is a TOQUE, which lets Poulet take one hit before defeat. If you have your Toque when you collect yet another prize, then you get HOTSAUCE which turns Poulet into HOTWINGS! who is an INVINCIBLE FLAMING DEATH BIRD
Killing blows struck consecutively without hitting the ground will give you a score multiplier. Same goes for when using Hotwings.
Enjoy! Right now, the high score is 639200!
Thanks again to Pizza and Innomin and of course Zep, and the whole community.
Fighting towards FINAL.
Caught some bugs, made some level tweaks.
Update 2016-06-04
Alright, here's my changelog. I'm about to finish this one for good this weekend I hope.
Changelog:
I'd like feedback on any parts of the level design that bug people. As I'd like to feel this is a finished game soon, and in all the hackin' the level design gets forgotten.
Update 01/06/16
I'm fired up for some Pico8 Action. I've got to get my first ever game polished before I hack on something new. Here's a new pass.
Changes and Fixes:
Left to do:
Update 9/11/15:
Yeah, so with all this work over the horizon, I just wanna take a final stab at completing this cart before I don't have any more time.
Total physics re-vamp. Collisions are handled more sensibly thanks to Innomin's advice. The new physics system made the speed and ranges of things a little different, so constants have been tweaked, and levels have been adjusted. I think it's less slippery, more controllable, and I can't duplicate any embedding in tiles bugs at this point. (I bet one of you folks can though!)
Feature changes:
There's bound to be bugs with all the changes, so please let lose and break it!
In response to the forum feedback, and watching someone else play it for a bit, I've decided it needed a lot of changes! Here they are...
Original Post:
Hey guys!
I've been cranking on this for a while, only sparsely tweeting about it from time to time. I figure it's done enough now to get some code review and bug finding by the community.
It's quite playable, but if you beat the fourth level, there's only a black abyss as your reward. I can't fit any more levels proper on the cart, so the last big feature I want to put in is some level-mutator code to repeat the existing levels with some re-arrangement to extend the game (And that there, is the joy of Pico 8-- the limitations taking us to wild places like that!)
I'd enjoy hearing what you guys think. Personally I look forward to feedback on just how hard it might be-- it might suffer from programmer-is-the-only-playtester syndrome at the moment, resulting in some serious difficulty.
I feel the collision code needs some tips from the masters. There's also some really dumb work around for my lack of knowledge about how we concatenate strings in Lua.
Oh and I desperately need to write more music-- this tune is gonna drive you insane pretty soon.
I hope you all like it!
EDIT:
I didn't tell you how to play!
Z to jump.
X/C to Headbutt-dash
If you get multiple kills on a single dash, you get a score multiplier!
Free lives are awarded by score.
There's four frames of "skidding" when a headbutt attack collides with the ground. That way, if you get driven face first into an enemy, you have a better chance of them getting hurt instead of you.
If you hold the up button while headbutting, your velocity doesn't change at all. This is for super careful maneuvers while attacking.
Every third prize balloon drops a Toque! Wearing the toque gives you one hit, with a blinkrate from an enemy. It doesn't protect you from lava, spikes, or falls!
If you open three more prize balloons, without losing your toque, you get hotsauce!