Fruit Fun Pico-8 Game

The Pico-8 cartridge for my game
The code of the game
The music system of Pico-8
The sprites I made for the game

Inspiration

I really enjoy playing platform and retro games such as Celeste and I thought it would be fun to learn how to make one myself!

What it does

I built a simple platformer game in which you are a cat who has to jump around and catch fruit falling from the sky. You win the game when you reach 50 points!

How I built it

I built this game using Pico-8, a game making software that runs on a modified version of the Lua language. For the first half of the hackathon I used tutorials to learn the basics of Pico-8 and afterward created my game.

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest challenges that I ran into was creating the main menu screen and win screen. Because I made them after the game and movement, I had to almost completely move around all my code to make a "state machine" or something that would allow me to shift between the main menu, win screen, and game state. There were several scary moments where I went to test the game and nothing happened, but I managed to fix it in the end!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of myself for making a fully functional game from scratch! I am also proud of myself for submitting my first ever hackathon project!

What I learned

The basics of Pico-8 and Lua
The basics of game development
How hard 8x8 pixel art is and how frustrating collisions can be

What's next for Fruit Fun Pico-8 Game

Something that I wanted to add at the very beginning of the project was a character select option. I want to make it so that once you achieve certain milestones (like collected 100 fruit or won 3 times) you could unlock new characters to play with such as a dog, panda, llama, etc.
I also wanted to add a stage select option where players could select a different environment to play in. However, these goals first require me learning how to create selection options in Pico-8!