LowRezJam Final Day - Publishing the App!

August 15, 2023 | Tags: programming gamedev lowrezjam

I did it! :neocat_happy_blep: I made it to the end of LowRezJam 2023! Those two weeks went quickly. While I didn’t get as far as I wanted to (I never do, really :neocat_pout: ) I still got a working final product! Let’s see what we have: :neocat_laptop:

Progress #

I changed the buttons used for various things. 🅾️ and ❌ increment and decrement the color, and ⬅️ and ➡️ increment and decrement the tools. This makes it a fair bit more intuitive to switch between tools and colors using buttons. The debug menu can also be opened with ⬆️.

The menu can be toggled with ⬇️. Here, you can view all of the colors and tools on screen at once and switch between them by clicking on what you want. There’s also a credits page, visible by clicking on the ? in the top right corner.

Making the clickable menu was pretty easy. If we align our icons on a grid (Pico8’s map makes that really easy) then we can simply detect which cell the mouse is currently hovering over by taking the mouse cursor x and y positions and dividing them by the cell size (8).

What Didn’t Get Finished #

The “platformer where you draw your own platforms” idea I mentioned in the first day was just an idea I wanted to write down since I thought of it. Realistically, I was never going to do it in this game jam. I’ll keep it in my back pocket if I ever need an idea for a future game jam :neocat_wink: .

I really did want to have some sort of save/load system using the JavaScript/Pico8 GPIO pins. The deadline just sort of snuck up on me and I didn’t get the chance. I might come back and do that at some point. At least you can save the image by taking a screenshot :neocat_googly: . (The Pico8 GPIO pins are such a strange/cool sounding feature and I really want to do something with them. Like, it would let you do so many things in Pico8 that realistically you shouldn’t be able to!)

Play it now #

The game is playable in browser on itch.io: :itchio: pico-draw

The source code is available on Github: :github: Rayquaza01/pico-draw

Also, make sure to check out the other :itchio: LowRezJam 2023 entries!