Forever Summers Part 1

02.18.2025

A big focus of my learning journey has been finding easy and inspiring projects to advance my knowledge. Without a doubt one of my most recomended tools for beginner coders is Pico-8. Pico-8 is a virtual fantasy consol for developing and playing 8 bit games. It has built in restrictions to project size, color pallet, and functionality. These restrictions are put in place to limit the users ability to obses over perfection. No need to be concerned over everydatail because frankly there just isn't that much detail to concern over.

When I discovered Pico-8 I immidiatly dove in head first. I started playing with the sprite editor and tried to think of a long term concept. After putting together a few cute animal characters I decided to go with a plot heavy game and landed on this as a story.

My game is called Forever Summers. It's an aknowlegement of climate change with a story line of optomism. Our game starts out with a bunny named Bonnie. Bonnie lives in a little solar punk community of critters. When the game starts you must help Bonnie jump over boulders as she runs home to prepare tohe community for rain and flooding. Once Bonnie arrives home she sees that most of the rain was blocked and the community wasn't flooded. She ventures outside of the community to find that a beaver had moved in upstream and built a danm.

While the beavers danm did block the flood waters it also blocks a lot of the water that the community relies on. Bonnie explains that the community shares everything and workes together with resources but the beaver is more interested in making a deal for the water. Bonnie and the rest of the solar punk community give the beaver resources and continue to invite him into the community despite his hyper individualistic ideals. There are some issues the community must fix throughout the plot. Their garden needs soil balancing and their power grid needs modifying. These are mini games that the player will engage with to learn animal facts and companion planting.

At the end of the game a fire breaks out in the community and the beaver is forced to decid between taking care of himself or sacrificing his home to send water down to the community. In the end he realizes his life has been imensly better because of this community and he doesn't want to struggle alone.

Ok thats enough propaganda for one post lets look at the acctual progress I have made with the game.

This whole game is made of of 4ish mini games. Thats where I started. The first game I made was the garden companion planting game.

This game functions simple enough. The left and right arrows move you through the soil blocks. The Up and down arrows change the selected seed type in the diologue box. X plants the selected seed in the highlighted soil block.

The blocks of soil are colored to indicate if they are balanced or unbalanced. Green soil is balanced. Red soil has a nitrate inbalance. Blue soil has a high Ph level. Yellow soil has a low ph level.

The goal of the game is to plant the right seeds to fix the soil and turn the whole garden green. This mini game will be played 3 times and each time the garden will get bigger.

The second game I made was the hacking game. This game will be played whenever the community has a power grid failure or infrestructure change. To complete this game the player will have to answer some animal trivia using binary.

The current trivia question will be displayed in the diologue box. Left and right will move the player through binary digets. X will change the highlighted diget from 1 to 0 and vice versa.

This game will also be played 3 times and with more questions added each round.

The most recent mini game I made was the jumping game. The player helps Bonnie jump over boulders as she runs through the forest. I am not sure how many times this game will be played. It's a very easy game, press the up arrow to jump over the boulder. You may note that the collisions are not very good. It's very easy to hit the boulder without touching the boulder.

One of the biggest learning curves to the jumping game was game state machines. In the other 2 games I didn't really build in game state machines (I will need to, but it wasn't madatory to building basic functionality). This process hurt my brain. It was the first time that I had ever thought in such a modular way and it took me a long time to figure out. There is a cute glitch in this game where if you jump right after clearning the final boulder, Bonnie will get stuck in the air and levetate off the screen. This would be a game state issue I havent resolved.

Another piece of the Pico-8 experience that I have thoroughly enjoyed is the music editor. Pico-8 handles all audio via sequencers. This makes composing music outside of 4/4 a little cumbersome. Naturally I had to try it. The first song I wrote... lets call it Triumphant Solidarity, was written in 3/4. It's short and sweet and uses some cool custom instruments to make percussion. Unfortunatly I did not know that Pico-8 has only 4 audio outputs and I used them all on this track. This makes adding sound effects for game play rather complicated.

For the second song I learned that lesson and built the song out of 3 tracks of audio, leaving one available for sound effects. This song... lets call it Quaint Community, was written in 7/8. The end result was a long repeating melody / rhythm. It's a cozy number that sits well as background music.