WORM•HOLE

A small little PICO-8 game that I made for the A Game By Its Cover 2022 jam!

This game is inspired by and named after the fictional cartridge art by Sean Williams over at the My Famicase Exhibition. Sean's design is also the cover image for this game! You should go check out his work.

The game is basically a faster-paced Asteroids with gravitational mechanics. My high score is was 3064!

CONTROLS

The left and right arrow keys control the ship's direction while the up and down arrow keys accelerate forwards and backwards respectively. The Z key corresponds to the O button on PICO-8, which alternately shoots and then detonates your projectile. The X key corresponds to the X button, which slows down your ship and charges up your projectile for a bigger explosion.

For Player 2, the PICO-8 defaults to ESDF as the directional keys, Tab as O, and Q as X.

TIPS

• Use your friction! If you are losing control, try to apply the brakes to slow yourself down and bring your orbit in closer.
• Fly through explosions! Though your bullet explosion will kill you most of the time, you will make it through just fine if you time your detonation right and fly through the early frames of the explosion! This includes when breaking apart asteroids- they won't harm you immediately after splitting.
• Use your power bomb to clear out large groups of asteroids.
• Maintain your orbit. The worm hole might be scary, but if you spend all your time out in space then you might get hit by an asteroid that you didn't see coming!
• Try to survive above all else. You will get points for enduring, and the asteroids do fall into the worm hole on their own- though the number of asteroids on screen will increase over time.

ROADMAP

This game is still being worked on, occasionally! Here is a list of the planned features and changes.

• Code refactor.
• Gamefeel tweaks including maximum speed on players, bullets, and meteors.
• A better start to the run than just throwing the player in with no time to react.
• Point the ship in a helpful direction at the start of a run, not just always up.
• Smooth ship rotation.
• Main menu.
• Local highscore.
• Indicators for off-screen meteors and players.
• Two-player mode.
• Combos.
• Optimization.
  
• Another code refactor.
• Easter eggs.
• Music/SFX remaster.
• Final polish/tweaks.

NOTES

• This game is more or less complete! I'm satisfied with how it currently stands, and all that remains are (admittedly major) features that I consider icing on the cake.
• The Lexaloffle BBS post for this little project is here!