Post Syndicated from Eevee original https://eev.ee/release/2020/09/26/lexys-labyrinth/

🔗 Lexy’s Labyrinth
🔗 Source code on GitHub
🔗 itch.io later

Here is Lexy’s Labyrinth, a web-based Chip’s Challenge emulator.

It’s easy to get into and mostly speaks for itself, so here is a story.

Once upon a time, there was a puzzle game called Chip’s Challenge. It was created in 1989 for the Atari Lynx, an early handheld that is probably best known for… uh… Chip’s Challenge. It stood out as a curious blend of Sokoban head-scratching with real-time action, and it was one of the first computer puzzle games that had a whole pile of different mechanics and relied on exploiting the interesting interactions between them^{[citation needed]}.

The game found wider recognition with its inclusion in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 4, and later the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack (charmingly abbreviated “BOWEP”).

That in itself is a curious story — numerous features of the Atari Lynx version were lost in translation, most notably that the Lynx version has the player and monsters slide smoothly between grid cells, whereas the Microsoft port has everything instantly snap from one cell to the next. Also conspicuous is the presence of several typos in level passwords, which are exactly consistent with a set of notes a player took about the Lynx game, but which would be impossible in a straight port — the Lynx level passwords weren’t manually set, but were generated on the fly by a PRNG.

The most obvious explanation is that the developer responsible for the Microsoft port didn’t have access to the Lynx source code, and in fact, had never played the original game at all. That would explain nearly every major gameplay difference between the Lynx and Microsoft versions, which are all things you’d never notice if you only had static screenshots and maps to work from. Given that restriction, hey, not a bad job.

I played the BOWEP edition of Chip’s Challenge as a kid and was completely enamoured. I suppose what got me the most was the same thing that I found so compelling about Doom: the ability to modify your environment, whether by using blocks to clear water or toggling green blocks or generating new monsters from a clone machine. Being able to affect my environment in (more or less) free-form ways felt curiously powerful.

…

Well, let’s not think about that too hard. I’ll save it for my therapist.

Some years later I discovered an incredible tool called The Internet, and with it I learned of the impending Chip’s Challenge 2, a sequel with way more tiles and possibilities! Fantastic!

Unfortunately, there was a complication. Epyx, the original publisher of Chip’s Challenge, had gone bankrupt (somehow!) and had sold most of its assets, including the Chip’s Challenge rights, to a company called Bridgestone Media (now Alpha Omega Productions), a Christian propaganda distributor.

You read that correctly.

Bridgestone, a company that generally dealt in movies, had some very peculiar ideas about the video game industry. Apparently they expected the assets they’d acquired to magically make them filthy rich — you know, just like Jesus would want — despite having acquired them from a company that had just evaporated. As such, they told the original developer, Chuck Somerville, that he could only release Chip’s Challenge 2 if he paid them one million dollars upfront.

He did not have one million dollars, and so Chip’s Challenge 2 languished forever.

(At this point, in hindsight, I wonder why Chuck didn’t simply change the story and tileset and release the game under a different name. Apparently he did start on something like this some years later, in the form of an open clone from scratch called Puzzle Studio, but it was eventually abandoned in favor of Chuck’s Challenge 3D. But I still wonder: why start a brand new thing, rather than rebrand and release the existing thing?)

We did have some descriptions of new Chip’s Challenge 2 mechanics, and so at the ripe old age of 15, with no idea what I was doing, I decided I would simply write my own version of Chip’s Challenge 2.

In QBasic.

Also I didn’t really understand how to handle the passage of time, so the game was turn-based and had no monsters.

But, given all that, it wasn’t that bad. I found the source code a few years ago and put it on GitHub along with a sample level and a description of all the tiles you can use in the plaintext level format. I’ve got a prebuilt binary for DOS (usable in DosBox) too, if you like — just have a levels.txt in the same directory, and be sure it uses DOS line endings. I used to have one or two actual levels, but they have tragically been lost to the sands of time.

That would’ve been 2002.

Thirteen years later, in April 2015, a miracle occurred and defeated the Christians. Chip’s Challenge 2 was released on Steam.

It was fine. I don’t know. Over a decade of anticipation gets your hopes up, maybe. It’s a perfectly good puzzle game, and I don’t want to dunk on it, but sometimes I interact with it and I feel all life drain from my body.

I don’t even know whether to talk about this completely unreadable way of showing hints or the utterly baffling justification of “being female” for these properties.

But it’s fine. The game was Windows-only, but it was old Windows-only, so Wine handled it perfectly well. I played through a few dozen levels. Passwords were gone, so you were free to skip over levels you just didn’t feel like playing.

And then they patched a level editor into the game, and it completely broke under Wine. Completely. Like, would not even run. It’s only in recent years that it even tries to run, and now it can’t draw the window and crashes if you attempt to do anything.

The funny thing is, apparently it doesn’t draw for some people on Windows, either. It doesn’t for me in a Windows VM. The official sanctioned solution is to… install… wined3d, a Windows port of the Wine implementation of Direct3D.

I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what the hell anything. This situation is utterly baffling. What even are computers.

I gave up on the game until recently, when something reminded me of it and I tried it again in Wine. No luck, obviously. I spent half a day squabbling with bleeding-edge versions and Proton patches and all manner of other crap, then resorted to the Bit Busters Club Discord, but they couldn’t help me either.

And then something stirred, deep inside of me. This game wasn’t that complicated, right? I actually know how to make video games now. I even know how to make art, sort of. And sound. And music. And…

And here I am, a month later, having replicated Chip’s Challenge in a web browser, fueled entirely by some new emotion I’ve discovered that lies halfway between spite and exhaustion. My real goal was to clone Chip’s Challenge 2 so I can actually fucking play this game I bought, but it is of course a more complex game. Still, CC2 support is something like 60% done; most of what remains is wiring, tracks, and ghost/rover behavior.

CC1 support is more interesting, anyway — there are far more custom CC1 levels around, and Lexy’s Labyrinth exposes almost 600 of them a mere click away. Given that the original Microsoft port was 16-bit and is now difficult to run (and impossible to buy), and the official (free!) Steam release is fairly awkward and unmaintained (the dev mostly makes vague statements about “old code”), and even the favored emulator Tile World has the aesthetics and usability of a 1991 Unix application, I’m hoping this will make the Chip’s Challenge experience a little more accessible. It has a partially working level editor, too, which lets you share levels you make by simply passing around a URL, and I think that is fucking fantastic.

LL cannot currently load level packs from the Steam release, but it’s a high priority. In the meantime, if you really want to play the original levels (even though CCLP1 is far better in my experience), it’ll load CHIPS.DAT if you’ve got it lying around. Also, it works on phones!

Probably the most time-consuming parts of this project were the assets. I had to draw a whole tileset from scratch, including all of the CC2 tiles which you don’t even get to see yet (and a few of which aren’t actually done). That probably took a week, spread out over the course of the entire last month. Sound effects took several days, though they got much easier once I decided to give up on doing them by wiring LFOs together in SunVox and just use a bunch of BeepBox presets. I spent a couple days on my own music track, and half a dozen other kind souls chipped in their own music — thank you so much, everyone!

And thank you to the Bit Busters Club, whose incredibly detailed knowledge made it possible to match the behavior of a lot of obscure-but-important interactions. The Steam version of CC1 comes with solution replays, and LL can even play a significant number of them back without ever desyncing.

I’ve been ignoring pretty much everything else for a month to get this in a usable state, so I’d like to take a break from it for now, but I’d really like to get all of CC2 working when I can, and of course make the level editor fully functional. I love accessible modding tools, you don’t see many of them in games any more, and with any luck maybe it’ll inspire some other kid to get into game development later.

…okay, I haven’t been ignoring everything else. I also reused the tiles I drew for a fox flux minigame in a similar style, except that you place a limited set of tiles in empty spaces and then let the game run by itself. Kind of like… Chip’s Challenge meets The Incredible Machine.

(That arrow tile has since been updated to be more clear, but it means “when you hit something, turn around instead of stopping and ending the game.”)

I guess two little puzzle game engines isn’t too bad for not quite a month of work!

Post Syndicated from Eevee original https://eev.ee/release/2020/05/10/star-anise-chronicles-oh-no-wheres-twig/

🔗 Play it on itch.io
🔗 Play it on the PICO-8 BBS (where you can also download the cart and view the source code)

(I originally drafted this just after publishing the game, but then decided to start a whole series about its development and wasn’t sure what to do with this! But it’s solid and serves a different purpose, so here it is.)

It’s been a while, but I made another PICO-8 game! It’s a little platformer with light puzzling, where you help Star Anise find his best friend Branch Commander Twig. It’s only half an hour long at worst, and it’s even playable on a phone!

This is the one-and-a-halfth entry in the Star Anise Chronicles series, which after several false starts, finally kicked off over Christmas with a… uh… interactive fiction game. Expect the series to continue with even more whiplash-inducing theme shifts.

More technical considerations will go in the “gamedev from scratch” series, but read on for some overall thoughts on the design. Both contain spoilers, of course, so I do urge you to play the game first.

The first attempt at a Star Anise game was two years ago, in early 2018. The idea was to make a Metroidvania where Star Anise had a bunch of guns that shot cat-themed projectiles, obtained a couple other cat-themed powers, and made a total mess of a serious plot happening in the background while he ran around collecting garbage.

After finishing up the Steam release of Cherry Kisses last month, we decided that our next game should be that one, which would now be Star Anise 2 (since i’d already released a Star Anise 1 some months ago). We have, uh, already altered these plans, but that’s the background.

I don’t really know why I started on this game. I guess there’s some element of stress to working on a project with someone, even if that someone is Ash (my spouse), and especially if I’m supposed to be driving it forward. I have to tell someone what to do, and then if I don’t like the result I have to ask them to fix it, and a lot of tiny design questions are out of my control anyway, and all of this is happening on someone else’s schedule, and I have to convey all the project state that’s in my head in a complicated non-verbal form, and… all of those things are a constant low-level source of stress.

So I guess we’d just finished a game that I’d designed, and it was looking like we were about to start a sizable project where I was the design lead again, and I wanted to make something I could finish by myself as an interlude.

And so I sat down with a teeny tiny tool to make a teeny tiny version of what I expected would be our next game.

Design

The basics were obvious: run, jump, land. I gave Star Anise little landing particles early on — they’re in the bigger prototype, I love landing puffs in general, and having them be stars adds so much silly personality.

I knew I wanted to have multiple abilities you collect, since that’s the heart of Metroidventures. I briefly considered giving Star Anise a gun, as in the prototype, but gave up on that pretty early. I would’ve had to sprite a gun, a projectile, a projectile explosion, enemies, enemy attacks, enemy death frames…

Don’t get me wrong; I have no problem with drawing all of that. The concern was that PICO-8 has a very limited amount of space for sprites — in the configuration I was using, 128 sprites of 8×8 pixels each. Star Anise himself takes up 9, even with some clever reuse for his walking animation. The star puff takes 4. The common world tile, plus versions for edges and corners, takes up 9. That’s 22 sprites already, more than 17% of the space I have, for absolutely nothing besides jumping around on solid ground. I would have to keep it simple.

That led me to the first two powers, both borrowed from the prototype:

• AOWR starts conversation with NPCs and opens doors. I can’t really take any creative credit here, since these are both things Anise attempts to do with aowrs in real life.

• Papping activates levers and knocks over glasses of liquid. Anise only does one of those in real life. (In the prototype, this is a gun — which shoots pawprint-shaped projectiles — but I’d already been thinking about making it a “melee” ability first.)

I adore both of these abilities. I think they both turn some common UI tropes on their heads. NPCs, doors, and levers are all things you usually interact with by pressing some generic “interact” button, but hitting a lever (and meowing at a door) adds some physicality to the action — you’re actually doing something, not just making it go.

And pressing A to talk to an NPC doesn’t really make any sense at all! Consider: almost universally, even in games where the player character speaks, pressing A to start a conversation leads off with the NPC talking. So what the hell did you actually do? What does pressing A represent actually doing that results in someone else casually starting a conversation with you, seemingly unprompted? I have no idea! It’s nonsense! But Anise meows at me all the time and I always respond to him, which is perfectly sensible.

The third power, telepawt, is a little newer. We’d conceived a cat teleporting power pretty recently, but it was more involved and required some big environmental props. I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t possibly do much of interest on the tiny PICO-8 screen (16 × 16 tiles), but I do like teleporting abilities! I briefly considered ripping off Axiom Verge, but I’ve already done that in fox flux, and the physics are a little involved… and then, lo, inspiration! Combine the two ideas: teleport great distances, but in a controlled and predictable way, by teleporting to the point on the opposite side of the screen. It felt like a very 8-bit kind of power, and I could already imagine a few ways to hide stuff with it, so off I went.

And that seemed like a reasonable progression. A way to talk (and progress through doors), a way to interact with objects, and a way to move around. I decided about halfway through development to make jumping a faux powerup as well; it stretches out the progression a bit more by making you walk past potential jumps and then come back to them later, which is important when I don’t have much map space to work with.

I’d originally planned for items to be separate from abilities, but ran into a couple problems, the worst of which was that I really didn’t have much screen space for sprinkling more items around. I ended up turning items into abilities in their own right, which I think was an improvement overall; now you can crinkle the plastic bag wherever you want, for example.

The game deliberately doesn’t try to explain itself; PICO-8 only has six buttons, and four of them are a d-pad, so I figured button-mashing (as in ye olde NES days) would get everyone through. Still, several players were confused about how to jump (and possibly gave up before even acquiring jump?), and one didn’t realize you could switch abilities, despite the up/down arrowheads on the ability box. Not sure what to learn from this.

The map

I struggled a bit with the map. PICO-8 has a built-in map editor with enough space for 32 screen-sized rooms (arranged in an 8 × 4 grid), which it turns out is not very many. I also very much did not want the game space to be confined to exactly that size of rectangle, so I knew I’d have to do some funky stuff with room connections. (Armed with that power, I ended up making loops and other kinds of non-Euclidean geometry, but hey that’s plenty appropriate for an imaginary moon.)

The bigger problem was designing the rooms outside of the PICO-8 map editor. I tried sketching in Krita, and then on paper, but kept running into the same two problems: it was tedious to rearrange rooms, and I didn’t have a good sense of how much space was available per room.

I found a novel solution: I wrote a Python script to export the map to a PNG, opened it in Aseprite, and edited it there — with each pixel representing a tile and the grid size set to 16. Now I knew exactly how much space I had, and rearranging rooms was easy: double-clicking a cell selects it, and holding Alt while dragging a selection snaps it to the grid. Here’s the beginning part of the game, screenshotted directly from Aseprite at 400% zoom:

When it came time to pack it all back into a rectangle, I copied the whole map, rearranged the rooms, and numbered them all so I could keep track of connections. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad a workflow.

The non-Euclidean map connections came in handy for packing secrets in more efficiently; most of the secret stars are off-screen, making them harder to find, but I couldn’t really afford to have a dedicated treasure room for every single one. So I crammed two treasures into the same room a few times, even though the two routes you’d take to get there are generally nowhere near each other.

Doors helped stretch the map out, too. It’s probably obvious if you think about it in the slightest, but doors don’t lead to different rooms; they reuse the same room. But some tiles only appear in the overworld, some tiles only appear in cave world, and actors (besides doors) don’t spawn in caves. That seemingly small difference was enough to make rooms vastly different in the two worlds; the most extreme case is a “crossroads” room, which you traverse vertically in the overworld but horizontally in cave world. (Honestly, I wish I’d done a bit more of this, but it works best in rooms that only have two overworld exits, and there ended up not being too many of those. Also, caves are restricted to basically just platforming, so there’s only so much variety I can squeeze out of them.)

Designing caves was a little trickier than you might think, since the PICO-8 map has no layers! If something needed to occupy a tile in the overworld, then I could not put something in the same place in cave world. Along with the design nightmare that is telepawt, this gave me a couple headaches.

I do like the cave concept a lot, though. I love parallel versions of places in games, and I have an unfinished PICO-8 game that’s centered around that idea taken to extremes. It’s also kind of a nod to my LÖVE games, all the way back to Neon Phase, where going indoors didn’t load another map — rooms were just another layer.

Aesthetics

Originally, PICO-8 had a fixed palette of 16 colors. You could do palette swaps of various sorts, but you can’t actually change any of the colors.

But since I last used it, PICO-8 gained a “secret palette” — an extra 16 colors that you can request. You can’t have more than 16 colors on the screen at a time, but you can replace one of the existing colors with a “secret” color. There’s also an obscure way to tell PICO-8 to preserve the screen palette when the game finishes, which means I could effectively change the palette in the sprite editor. Hooray!

I didn’t want to completely change the palette, so I tried to keep the alterations minor. For the most part, I gave up reds and pinks for a better spread of greens, purples, and yellows. Here’s the core PICO-8 palette, the secret PICO-8 palette, and the game’s palette, respectively:

I think I did a decent job of preserving the overall color aesthetic while softening the harsh contrasts of the original palette, and the cool colors really helped the mood.

Note that I changed the background color (color 0 isn’t drawn when it appears in a sprite) to navy and promoted black to a foreground color, which helped black stand out more when used as an outline or whatever. Probably the best example of this is in the logo, traced from the vector logo I made for the first Star Anise game.

Hmm, what else. The tiles themselves felt almost forced, if that makes sense? Like I could only draw them one way. PICO-8 tiles are a rinky-dink 8 pixels, and boy that is not much to work with. If I had a lot of sprite space, I could make bigger metatiles, but… I don’t, so I couldn’t. I tried a lot of variations of tiles, and what I ended up with were pretty much the only things that worked.

I love how the emoting came out. I knew I didn’t have nearly enough room for facial expressions for everyone, but I wanted to give them some kind of visual way to express mood, and the tiny overlays kinda fell naturally out of that. I think they add a ton of personality, especially in how everyone uses them differently.

I’m pretty happy with the sound design, as well. I’m an extremely amateur composer, and I wrote 90% of the music in a few hours on the start of the last day, but I actually like how it came out and I like going back to listen to it. The sound effects are, with some mild exceptions, pretty much excellent — the aowr is incredible, it has fooled other folks in the house more than once, and I knew I had it right when I had a blast just running around mashing the meow button.

I’m also happy with the dialogue, and hope it conveys the lunekos’ personalities in just these few interactions.

While writing the ending, I had to stop in mid-draft to go cry. Then I cried again when I finished it a few days later. I’ll miss you forever, Branch Commander Twig.

If you did, thanks for playing.