It’s been a while since I posted about the project in general. I find it increasingly hard to post while juggling all of the other stuff that I’m supposed to do as an indie :/

Anyway, in this post I’ll share some of the stuff that happened since my last post and some stuff to look forward to in the near future.

  • I’m talking with an artist to make the game more visually appealing on Steam & other platforms

  • I released the game on PICO8 and itch!

  • The Steam page is up!

  • I’m working on porting the game to Godot which means more spells, enemies & adventure!

One of the key points that the project seems to consistently fail at is getting people’s attention. The retro/programmer art aesthetic of the game doesn’t exactly turn people’s head, so I need to work on something else. I’ve decided to hire an artist to work more on Clarice as a character. This for in-game pieces and for a whole set of assets for the Steam page. Hopefully this’ll give more eyes to the project as well!

So the miniature version of the game is finished! It’s even been out for a while now! The reception has been far from staggering or even welcoming (unfortunately). The amount of people that played the game is still far below 100 people (my target for the PICO8 version).

I’ve concluded that I had a lot of oversight with what constitutes as a good PICO8 game. I thought that the community would love a more mechanically complex game. However, due to the game’s more complex nature it’s less accessible to play (because of the learning curve) and the controls are less accessible too!

All in all this shouldn’t have been a PICO8 game from the beginning. To combat this, I made a small manual. Unfortunately not a lot of people seem to make use of it tho :( These games seem to do a lot better if you already have an established audience. I don’t, so yeah. that didn’t work out.

The limits of the console did bring me a game rather than another unfinished prototype, which I’m thankful for. You can play the game on the PICO8 forums or on my Itch page! If you want to support me please leave a comment on the PICO8 forums as it’ll bump my game on SPLORE (the PICO8 game browser) and the forums. I want more people to play the game, help me achieve that :)

You can now wishlist the non-PICO8 version of the game on Steam! (and please do so by clicking that link!). It’s been a long journey for me as a game developer to get to the point of a Steam partnership, let alone a Steam page for my game. I want to thank y’all for supporting me through this journey. The accountability of this forums has helped a bunch. I also want to thank Lewis Woodhouse for helping me out with page as well as other smaller marketing steps along the way.

Hopefully I can rack up a bunch of wishlists and get this game out there in due time!

I’ve started work on porting the game from PICO8 into a larger Godot project. Working in PICO8 is amazing, but being limited by 8192 tokens and a Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard get old. I was more preoccupied with saving tokens than with adding cool gameplay. I even had to cut large parts of systems that I wanted to be part of the original cartridge. Now I don’t have to worry anymore! Here’s some GIFs and a list of stuff I did.

Some notable things I got to do thus far:

  • Reimplement world generation

  • Reimplement magic system

  • Make a more intuitive casting systems that uses 5 buttons rather than 2

  • Reimplement ALL spells and their effects

  • Implement all enemies (except the boss)

  • Implement sailing

  • Implement more UI

  • Implement hopping onto and off of islands(!!!)

  • Controller support/focus

Thank you if you’ve been reading this from the beginning or just joined this little devlog. I’ll probably be posting a lot less often. I hope to hear from y’all tho! Please comment on this post and send me all the love you can by @‘ing me or the project on Twitter.

See y’all soon!