Craptastic is a wonderful game jam. It has been running for quite a while. It has produced a large number of unique tiny games!
Prior Craptastic jams have produced many unique, small and focused games. These include Rougue 4k, which was extended into Rougue64. It was extended again to Rouguecraft on Amiga. The full 2022 results can be found here: https://reset64-magazine.itch.io/2022-craptastic-compo
The best entry does not always win. ‘Crappiness’ also plays a big part in the scoring. The idea is just to have fun with it and just let the judging happen!
Check out the lineup for this year’s Craptastic 4k here: https://ausretrogamer.com/2024-4kb-craptastic-game-competition-preview/ It looks like a lot of exciting entries and there is also possible secret entries. All entries will be completed on September 1!
I have tried to join a couple of times. I keep failing. I think that 4 kilobytes of game in six months is for some reason a simple thing.
So THIS time I am focused, prepared and determined. I will spend a bit of time every day unless I am too tired. I also won’t spend time if I don’t have any coding energy left.
I went with the game concept I came up with for Craptastic 2022. I didn’t even get started with it that year (see previous line). So with nearly two years of passive planning I am ready to dig in!
So this is what I have at the starting point:
- The title “Escape from the Metaverse” comes from a 2022 news article. It discussed how dumb the idea of the Metaverse was. The article also mentioned how tech moguls lost silly amounts of money on the idea. Apparently the weak point of the idea was the failure to visually render pants on the player characters. (EftMv solves the pants issue).
- The elevator pitch is that gravity is not a constant. This is indicated by the screen character background color. It is also shown by a faint arrow on empty screen characters.
- Extended Background Color Mode is ideal for this game. I can treat the screen as normal text mode. The limit of 64 unique characters works well with the limits.
4096 bytes is not that much memory. This informs the coding, design, and art style. Optimizing for memory is the key pillar.
“Craptastic” implies some kind of crappyness. I’ve picked what that means for this game! The second pillar is that players should feel that the game is unfairly designed, but never impossible. Basically players might hate playing the game but always feel they can do better.
So from those goals, I just need to cram as many game mechanics as I can fit. Then I need to create as many levels with those mechanics as I can fit.
Turns out that is harder than I imagined. 4kb is a lot of memory to fill up when you’re careful. I’ve heard of games with 80GB patches, but that’s really not my comfort zone.
So to fast-forward to where the project is right now: It is a platformer. It is time based (as in speed running, not time limited). Gravity is directed either down, left, up or right.
I’m designing the 13th level. Each time I get bored of level design, I go back to add more game mechanics. This helps to use up memory faster! I’m just a few weeks from the deadline and I still have just 33 bytes left to fill. I’m using all unique 64 screen characters, and the player has 64 frames of animation.
Quite a few of the levels can be completed in 10 seconds. Most of the time it takes me at least 1.5 minutes. Getting the perfect time takes a lot of practice 🙂 If you can even finish a level.
Touching spikes loses you a life and the level restarts. You start with 5 lives. Picking up 5 coins earns another life. That probably won’t be enough without practice and finding the correct pace for each level!
What is left is “just” finishing the sound effects. I need to finish level 13. I must iterate on the game difficulty. I should also make a player guide screen to show what everything does. Since starting this article I’ve added a final game mechanic. I also need to add that to levels where it makes sense.
I hope someone has the patience to play through the whole game when it is finished. I hope they share the end screen. I haven’t really managed it myself yet even though I can play through each level by itself. Just a few short weeks left.. better get back to it!
Here is a video teaser of level 2! The timer starts at 0:00 when the level starts but I’ve failed a couple of times already here…
Space Moguls 