Log 6 - I Can't Stop Playing Picross

See the Pico² Design Document!

Finally coding in PICO-8!

For my first milestone, I focused on implementing the core gameplay features.

• Displaying the puzzle grid
• Moving the cursor around the grid
• Filling or crossing out spaces
• Detecting when the puzzle has been finished

These were easy enough - I had already implemented most of them in my prototype, so it was mainly polish and reducing token counts.

Next I had to port over my Python functions from logs 3 and 4. This ended up being way more annoying than I expected, for two reasons:

• Lua indexes iterables starting at 1, while Python uses 0. This seems like a tiny change but debugging this was a nightmare!
• I decided to switch to strings instead of lists as they’re more token efficient, but this meant changing some operations. Also a nightmare!

Many, many, many debug print statements later, I finally got there and I’m super happy with the result.

The random generation works too; it’s super slow at anything over around 12x12, but I’ll hopefully optimise that later.

It’s so gratifying having something actually playable after so much experimentation. I’m at that stage where I’ll just play my game every time I save and reload changes - fun, but it’s getting difficult to concentrate on actually developing the thing!

To fix that, I’m working on menus now - I’ve built the general skeleton for the menus, including the settings page which can be overlaid on any other screen.

Next, I need to actually design the visuals for the menus. I want to keep things clean and simple for the menus - I have a tendency to go super ambitious but I want to rein it in a bit here, mainly so I can save the impressive stuff for the levels themselves.

I’m going to be a lot busier than I thought, so I’m pushing the game back by two weeks. This will give me time to implement everything I want and polish properly. Look forward to Pico²’s release on 23rd February 2025!

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