Dungeon Apprentice - a PICO-8 DM Tribute
Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 5:27 pm
I'm in the early stages of writing a DM-style game for the PICO-8 fantasy console:
Working title is Dungeon Apprentice. I'm open to any pun-tastic suggestions though.
As it's 33 years since Dungeon Master was first released today (I think) I thought it might be nice to give people a sneak preview of what I've been doing.
PICO-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php), especially as it's restricted to 128x128 resolution, is easily fast enough to allow a reasonable clone to be made and at 2MB of space for Lua runtime I'm fairly confident that it's got enough memory. The big problem I'm having is with the size of the virtual "cartridges" which have to come out under 16kb after compression. Given DM used image compression itself and had approx 20 times that space for storage I'm struggling a bit even after knocking together my own compression routines and cutting down scope. The plan is to get something playable into a single cart then look at spreading data across multiple files (a bit awkward, but can be done) in order to make something a bit closer in scope to the original games.
I'm hoping to make a few introductory levels that feel a bit more like the start of DM for people who haven't had the pleasure of munching on dragon steaks with a side of corbum, then have a clear "prepare to meet thy doom" point where it gets a bit more... fun
(This kind of thing is what's delaying any redrawing of hero portraits, Journeyman
)
Working title is Dungeon Apprentice. I'm open to any pun-tastic suggestions though.
As it's 33 years since Dungeon Master was first released today (I think) I thought it might be nice to give people a sneak preview of what I've been doing.
PICO-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php), especially as it's restricted to 128x128 resolution, is easily fast enough to allow a reasonable clone to be made and at 2MB of space for Lua runtime I'm fairly confident that it's got enough memory. The big problem I'm having is with the size of the virtual "cartridges" which have to come out under 16kb after compression. Given DM used image compression itself and had approx 20 times that space for storage I'm struggling a bit even after knocking together my own compression routines and cutting down scope. The plan is to get something playable into a single cart then look at spreading data across multiple files (a bit awkward, but can be done) in order to make something a bit closer in scope to the original games.
I'm hoping to make a few introductory levels that feel a bit more like the start of DM for people who haven't had the pleasure of munching on dragon steaks with a side of corbum, then have a clear "prepare to meet thy doom" point where it gets a bit more... fun
(This kind of thing is what's delaying any redrawing of hero portraits, Journeyman
)