Bebboware's Itchio page.
I made Bebboware for a friend's birthday in Pico 8, working here and there on it for about a month. Overall I'm pretty pleased about how it turned out.
The intention was to make a little bit of a Warioware-esque mini-game collection. Doing something like this has quite a few benefits:
- It's a good thing to do for relatively inexperienced programmers.
- There is no upper or lower limit. Within reason, you can essentially keep creating as long as you have ideas and/or time
Making small micro games tests a lot of different skills, but lacks the complexity of a larger project. Since each game is self contained and essentially only has to do a single thing, they're good testbeds for experimentation on things you aren't too familiar with. Collision, manipulating sprites, timers, array searching etc. One thing I was aware of but never really remembered to use until this project was using a Sin wave to make things wobble around on a curve.
There are a fair few drawbacks though...
- Minigames are bloody hard to think up. Even more so when you base them entirely around a single person thematically. Even moremoreso when no-one's gone anywhere/done anything for a year.
- When you're doing self contained tiny games, its so easy to just hack it together. This is also a plus to be clear. Everything is so self-contained that there's not a lot of tech debt that you can build up and it isn't too hard to bugfix. On the other hand, its terrible for long term practices and habits. This approach is death for a bigger project. (As a side note, you have no idea how hacked together this **** is. It's amazing).
For sure the thing I'm most pleased with is the present opening game. The cuts are satisfying to make, there's a nice audio feedback, the jagged cut looks great, and all the Bebbs running in every direction when you open it is just fantastic.
