I finished up the two tweet game I made for TweetTweet Jam 6, see the blog entry for that game here. The short of it is that the game code couldn't be longer than 560 characters (two tweets).

Naturally this meant some things got left on the cutting room floor, so I decided to make a DELUXE version that would be expanded a little, have a little more polish et cetera et cetera.

By the time I was done, it came in a little over ~1400 or so characters, so I decided I'd cut it down to four tweets in length! (1120 characters). Naturally this was a huge mistake.

Still, I got it down to dead on 1120 characters in the end. There were some very painful cuts, the worst of which was possibly the text strings and text formatting, which took a lot of space. That's why it has + and O representing the fuel canisters and planets respectively instead of writing 'planet' etc. Worst of all is that I couldn't think of a shorter synonym for 'avoid', which is why the game tells you to 'shun' the planets, saving a single character.

I managed to pack in a great deal of new and improved stuff though!
  1. One (1) whole sound effect for the engines. Originally there were two, but any sound effect after the first takes one more character to trigger (compare 'sfx(0)' to 'sfx(01)'
  2. One (1) music track. I am terrible at making music, so I'm very grateful to Robbie Duguay, who had an older Pico8 cart with some free tracks. It's very good
  3. A little jet of flame shooting out of the rocket when you jet. Sadly there wasn't room to add one on each side for jetting sideways, but its a nice bit of visual feedback now
  4. I restored the old collision, using the pixels on each end of the players ship, which feels a lot better. Likewise I restored the old ring indicating what your orbit is at your current height, which makes the whole thing a fair bit easier.
  5. 60fps takes more characters, but feels much better to play.
  6. I added a snazzy title screen that scrolls the sun to the centre of the screen before the game starts and allowed me to give some ingame instructions (wow those took a lot of characters). I also shortened the title to 'O inter O' with the same symbol I used for the planets and was able to fit in the music credit, just.
  7. Finally, I had to ditch the text for score and power level, it just wouldn't fit and I think you can work it out from context.


Again this took about another half day and I'm very pleased with it. It plays much better and has stronger presentation. There's a single unresolved bug which I may return to at some point. It there's an occasional (collision?) bug that causes the player to pick up respawning canisters instantly for a short period no matter where they are. I think this probably as far as this project goes though, there won't be a DX DX version, though I may return to the general concept at some point.