Ruff Seas - A Pirate Treasure Map Adventure

USE THIS MAP: https://bit.ly/RuffSeasMap

You're a swashbuckling pirate pooch on a quest to find your buried treasure.  Navigate the salty seas and shoot down enemy ships, and gather resources from the shore to fix your ship and make new cannonballs.

This is an entry into the MajorJam, with a limitation of having the game extend beyond the game itself.  So, I thought the idea of a pirate treasure map was pretty interesting.  My goal was to make a land that you can explore by yourself, but is a little frustrating unless you have a map.  I think the concept works pretty well.

I made all the code, art, sound, and music myself during the jam all in Pico-8.

This was my first major foray into making a legit game with Pico-8.  I learned a TON on this project.  Here are some of the highlights:

Collision: Pico-8 doesn't have a collision system... or really much of any system, it's pretty much roll-your-own everything other than a basic tilemap/sprites/sound.  So I used some modified code from a sample collision project.  It involves testing each corner of the spite and finding the tile under each.  

Autotile: Yeah there's no autotile at all.  with a map this big I was facing a LOT of work just placing the land tiles.  So, having recently learned about the power of for loops, I wrote a function to loop through each tile and replace the edges of the land based on if there are water tiles around it.  Works really well!  Definitely going to use this trick again.

Resource Population:  I used a similar for loop to randomly place resources around the map.  Each blank piece of land/beach has a certain chance of spawning a tree or rock.

Creating Bullets and Spawining enemies: If there's one thing I've learned on this project, it's the power of tables in Pico-8.  The player, the enemies, and all the cannonballs are organized with tables.  Tables are used as classes basically, so you can spawn a new instance of a class by adding a new item to a table.  Then you can loop through all the instances in the table to animate each instance separately.  Super cool.

External Editors: I used Pico-8 on Mac OSX with Sublime Text.  I had several different .lua files that were referenced in the Pico-8 file.  This is the best way to work, man!  So much easier to use on a 2nd screen!