No

• 

  the main character duck next to the gun

• 

  the very first level of No

Inspiration

I was inspired by games such as Undertale and Deltarune, where the player can choose the spare enemies if they so choose, and that affects the story. In my game, I decided to combine elements of various Flash games I enjoyed playing in my youth, as well as random things that came to my mind during the development process. The name "no" comes from my friend because I asked him to say something random, and he said "no."

What it does

This is a short (~20 minute if you are skilled) game about a war between ducks and salmon, where you play as a lone duck that has to face an army of salmon, and you get some choices that you can make along the way to affect the story and the ending. There are also some extra bonuses that you can pick up and a total of 7 levels. It can be completed either through fighting, or through dodging, and the player doesn't have to pick up the gun at the starting level to be able to complete the game.

Controls (same as TIC-80 general controls):

• arrow keys = move
• z = fire / pick up
• Ctrl+r = restart the game

How I built it

Using Scheme (the Lisp dialect) and the TIC-80 fantasy console, which is essentially a fun platform for making retro games.

Challenges I ran into

TIC-80 doesn't support multiple files so the whole game has to fit in a single lisp file which got very annoying to navigate as the project got bigger.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think it's a clever "karma" system system. When you go and become evil, the game gets harder with extra obstacles, whereas it is easier if you don't kill anyone. Also, this was a really fun project and I just had a lot of fun making it. I tried to minimise the use of AI although I did use it for some refactoring late into the hackathon as I was running out of time.

What I learned

I definitely improved by scheme skills, which will be useful as I love lisp (I am a Common Lisp user currently, mostly) and scheme really lends itself to scripting and embedding.

What's next for No

Although there is some of it currently in the game, I was hoping that I could add some more gameplay effects based on which route you take. I might also refactor the code to make it easier to modify.

Built With

• lisp
• scheme
• tic-80