Thread by @Enichan

This is the new Cat Slime Does a Dungeon dev thread. Cat Slime is a tamagotchi/dungeon diving game made in #pico8.

To support cat slime and find out more see patreon.com/sharkhugseniko. You can also follow cat slime at @HappyCatSlime

Previous dev thread:

https://twitter.com/Enichan/status/1092653016640090112

Haven't gotten a lot done lately, but I did just get the room template data I need to procgen levels loaded into the game so I can start on that soon.

Going with a tile based generation method for level generation. Haven't randomized the connections yet, so everything connects to all neighbors right now, but it's looking pretty decent. #gamedev #pico8 #catslime #procgen

Stuck on routing so my mind wandered and I've decided I'm gonna add a movement ability to cat slime that shrinks you so you can squeeze through a tiny hole in the wall.

Artist's impression of tiny cat slime squeezing through a hole in the wall

Did some work on generating the basic path through the dungeon. Purple rooms don't require a key, green rooms require the small key, and orange rooms require the big key (which is somewhere in the green rooms).

Here's 4 random layouts.
#gamedev #procgen #catslime #pico8

Really shocked at how good this method is turning out since it's relatively simple. Here's a random layout with unconnected side rooms colored gray. Those'll be optional side paths, which are gated by some movement ability or other you have to unlock.

Finally found some time to sit down and work on this a little more. Basically finished the level layout now. Areas that require a movement ability are optional side-paths.
#pico8 #gamedev #procgen #catslime @HappyCatSlime

#pico8 tip: copy global variables into a local variable at the start of a function if you're using that global variable many times inside a function (like in a loop).

Doing this just helped speed up Cat Slime's rendering by 12%

PS: this also works for built-in functions!

That's a lotta locks
#gamedev #pico8 #catslime @HappyCatSlime

Eyy we've got doors! Two types too, plain lock, and golden lock (not pictured)

Gold lock door.
#gamedev #pico8 #catslime @HappyCatSlime

And that's level generation basically done. Got #procgen levels gated by keys, with optional side paths gated by movement abilities.

Light grey pixels are locked doors, yellow pixels are gold locked doors, dark blue are pits and light blue is water.

#pico8 #gamedev

At 5030 tokens now so uhhh it's time to start adding gameplay soon methinks.

My goal for Cat Slime Does a Dungeon was a single cart but I don't feel like I HAVE TO stick to that. I could easily shunt all the level generation code into a side-cart which runs to generate and store a new level, then (re)loads the main cart.

Free up a lot of tokens that way.

Current status: thinking about increasing my available texture space by cramming two 2 bit textures into the same space and separating them using palette tricks

Yep that works! Created a utility that takes two images with 4 colors or less, and crams them into the same pixel space by using 2 bits per pixel for both, and saves two palettes that can be used to get the original back. Double the texture space!

#gamedev #pico8 @HappyCatSlime

Aww yeaaahhhh, I realized that instead of calculating everything needed to draw the world every frame I can just do it once and cache a bunch of functions which render the world. Massive speed up!

90% CPU before, 49% CPU after :D #gamedev #pico8

The only problem is that prepping the draw cache AND drawing it in a single frame causes an FPS drop, but I handle that by.... just not refreshing the screen when the cache gets invalidated!

Better to have a duplicate frame than risk losing inputs.

Finally implemented the texture mashup method described in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Enichan/status/1103398039966924800

You can't see the difference, but I just roughly doubled my available texture memory! :D The floor textures that used to take up two slots, now only take up one.

#gamedev #pico8

Working on adding entities to Cat Slime Does a Dungeon (@HappyCatSlime). First step is obviously to transform world coordinates to screen coordinates and scale things appropriately, so after a lot of pondering I got that done as efficiently as possible.

#gamedev #pico8