Right. Last time I had a deck of cards and a scoring system. Since then I’ve built a shop, twenty mods, ten bosses, and I’ve hit the wall every PICO-8 developer hits eventually. More on that in a minute. First, the fun stuff.
The shop
Between rounds you get to spend your winnings. You can level up your poker hands (there are nine), buy card enhancements (bonus, gold and glass) and, most importantly, buy mods.
Mods are basically jokers. They’re the things that break the rules in your favour, and they’re where a run gets its personality. You can hold three at a time. Three felt like the sweet spot: enough to build a combo, few enough that every choice hurts a bit.
Twenty mods, twenty tiny portraits
I wanted every mod to feel like a character, so each one got its own little pixel portrait. Some favourites so far:
- Lucky Penny, who does exactly what you’d hope, occasionally
- Royal Decree, for people who like face cards and power
- Pack Hunter, which rewards you for playing lots of the same thing
- a sword shaped like a spade, because sometimes the name writes itself
Drawing twenty portraits in a 128×128 sprite sheet that also has to hold the cards, the font, the UI and everything else is a puzzle in itself. Every portrait is a few pixels smaller than I’d like. That’s PICO-8. You learn to love the squint.
Boss blinds
Every third round is a boss blind, and every boss bends one rule. Hearts get taxed. Your hand size shrinks. Gold stops paying out. There are nine of them, plus a final boss waiting at the end of ante 8, who I’m not going to spoil because I haven’t finished being mean to him yet.
Bosses are where the game started to feel like a game rather than a calculator. A run that’s going brilliantly suddenly meets a boss that hates exactly what you’ve built, and you have to adapt or die. Mostly die, in my testing.
The token wall
And then it happened. I added the last mod, pressed run, and PICO-8 politely told me I was over 8,192 tokens.
What followed was two weeks of the least glamorous work I’ve ever done:
- Merging ten functions that did almost the same thing into one function that does all of them, badly
- Replacing every “if this, then that” chain I could find with lookup tables
- Storing mod descriptions as one long string and chopping it up at runtime
- Deleting a feature I loved (a “run history” screen), mourning it briefly, then moving on
- Renaming variables to single letters, then immediately regretting it
I got back under the limit with about 200 tokens to spare. That isn’t much breathing room for a whole soundtrack, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, probably screaming.
Where it’s at
- Shop and nine levelable hands: done
- 20 mods with portraits: done
- 9 bosses plus a final boss: done (still tuning the mean ones)
- 8 antes, 24 rounds: playable start to finish
- Hard mode: planned
- Music: there isn’t any. It’s very quiet. It’s unsettling.
A full run takes about 20 to 30 minutes, which is the perfect length for “just one more” and also the perfect length to make you late for things.
Next time: the music, the handhelds, and actually putting it out there.
– TJ (Taylonius)
