RELEASE!

Well - I made it. A few days under the radar for submission to the jam, but I am insanely busy tomorrow and out of town this weekend, so I gave myself today as the deadline.

I managed to implement almost everything I wanted (in no particular order):

• title + instruction Screen
• victory screen/conditions
• clicker movement
• independent  timers
• bonus timer reward
• info box
• levelup & unlock mechanics
• custom sprites
• sfx & background music (with mute toggle)
• variable speed for QoL & ease of use
• dialog boxes
• no visible bugs

What I'd like to do in the future:

• increase level cap from 10
• make the speed multiplier purchasable unlocks
• have the music increase tempo with the speed

Tools utilized:

• PICO-8
• Notepad++
• OneNote
• ChatGPT
• StableDiffusion (for the cover image)

What I learned:

As someone who hasn't written an appreciable line of code since the 90s or early 00s outside of 1 c++ class in undergrad where the only thing I remember is the professor's name - there was a lot to learn, but fortunately choosing to work in PICO-8 was able to unlock some core memories of programming in various BASIC languages and the texas instruments asm/basic on the graphing calculators. The logical manner of thinking and being able to logic my way through for loops and if statements was helpful too, but calling sprites, moving a cursor around a unique and ever changing UI, dealing with arrays and nested array objects or what not... never really understood that, but now it makes sense!

I utilized ChatGPT for some generic debug stuff, but honestly not all that much more than that. It was frequently incorrect, but there were a good number of times where it was able to correct me calling the wrong variable/function or having something inside/outside of a loop or if statement that should have been swapped. Ultimately it was like a more interactive version of rubber duck debugging, and if I didn't have some background in programming logic - it would have been more or less useless.

Working in PICO-8 placed a lot of constraints, but it made me think about clever ways to solve the problem and still get my intended result. It might not look amazing, but there is a lot underneath the hood.

• 17,710 characters
• 3717 tokens
• 917 lines of code
• 7 sfx channels
• 2 music channels
• 4 "releases" to itch
• > 30 hours total development time for sure over the course of 10 days (though I did not track it)

We've come a long way from:

and

to

and

I want to give a big shoutout to a few folks who acted as de facto beta testers for this and provided great and insightful feedback:

• u/JoshDM on reddit
• thenorthernharpy on discord (and in the PIG Squad server)
• enderelf here on itch
• The folks over in the PIG Squad server and the official PICO server

I had a good time doing this, and learning something new. I hope y'all enjoy!