Postmortem: balancing aesthetic vs scope

I’m back in Pico-8. Who could’ve known?

After working on a framework in Defold for a month or two, and getting increasingly frustrated with “it doesn’t feel like Pico-8” I was starting to give up on it. The nail in the coffin was me seeing Picotron, basically Pico-8 but on steroids developed by the same person who developed Pico-8. So now I’m focused on having fun in Pico-8, rather than trying to create my own framework with all the headaches that comes with that. And then eventually moving over to Picotron for projects where that fits better (and when Picotron is a bit more mature). 

I think what I really like with this game is the gameplay. I think it’s very elegant, you have one button but it can do a lot of things. Turning? Yes. Moving? Yes. And you can really work on perfecting the amount of time you hold the button, for maximum speed. 

However, I feel like the game lacks a bit of theming. Like it’s just a rectangle moving around. I’ve been playing a bit of old flash games lately, and while they are often sort of samey RPGS, they have really intriguing settings / stories. I think my games are missing that element. I think that’s part of why feed the kind did as well as it did; it has an intriguing setting. The eyes and the body is at least to me more intriguing than “cube in space”. In the future I want to think more about what kind of fantasy I want the player to have. Space pirate? Makeup artist? Ominous overlord of a group of cultist rats? I think I’ll start writing elevator pitches like that before starting to work on the game. 

However, a thing that did go really well in this jam was the development process. It was super smooth. Having a super simple game idea to start from was helpful, it was implemented in less than four hours. Then I just built on that. In previous games I have often overscoped to fit the idea that I wanted to portray. So now I’ll have to find a balance between creating interesting settings and simple enough gameplay. Let’s see how it goes. 

Thanks for checking in, see ya around!