Log 7 - Mid-Development Review

Pico² is releasing soon on PICO-8! Follow on itch.io for updates!

See the Pico² Design Document!

So… February 23rd is here - where is Pico²??

It’s been a busy few weeks, and I haven’t had as much time to develop this game as I had hoped. Let’s look at how development’s gone, and what’s coming up in the next few weeks.

Status Update

First, let’s see the game in action. I’ve completed most of the main menu and level selection, including loading into the levels and an early level completion screen.

The random generation menu is also complete, with a special menu to select the width and height.

The main menu and level selection screens.

Loading into levels doesn’t have much charm yet, but that should be coming very soon.

The random generation menu.

Menus and transitions between game states are always super finicky, so I’ve spent most of the last two weeks bug fixing and polishing the animations and menu movement. Still a ways to go, but I’m happy with it so far.

At this stage, all the key functionality is finished (or almost finished) - the next step is art and styling, which will definitely need plenty of iteration to get right. Excited to dive into more dynamic art!

Tutorial

My main focus for the last few days has been the tutorial. I drafted a version (Iteration 1 in the design doc), and started by implementing that. Turns out, it was a really shitty tutorial 😅 It took a slightly embarrassing play-test to make that clear to me, so I redesigned it almost completely.

Along the way, I developed two key visual cues:

• The spotlight draws the user’s attention to a certain area of the screen. I managed to make it fairly token-efficient, and I’m really happy with how it looks.
• The ghost draws faded game elements to indicate what the player should do next. I need to play-test this to see how effective it is, but I think it at least looks nice.

The spotlight draws the user’s attention to a specific part of the puzzle.

The ghost shows the user what to do next.

The latest iteration (3) is fully written on the doc as well; it’s about three times as long as the first, which might end up being excessive. More play-testing will be essential to tuning this well.

Looking Back on Development

So far, development’s varied hugely. I was very ambitious at the beginning of development and happened to have plenty of time to get things done, but that’s changed recently. I’ve gone from full days to spare hours on the weekends.

I’m really glad I set the original release date of 9th Feb - it was never actually for anyone else, just to push myself to get something finished quickly. That didn’t end up happening, but the progress I made on the design document and refining my vision was invaluable in the end.

The second release date was a little more silly - I pretty much wasted those extra two weeks, and now here we are at the “release date” only about halfway through development! Still, I have newfound appreciation for how difficult it is to scope a project and predict the timeframe of development.

As I said, I’m not going to set another release date, probably until the game is around 95% finished. I feel very confident now in the scope of the project and the amount of content I want to include, and I don’t feel the need to set a date to convince me to work on the project.

Next Steps

Art and sound will be the main focus for the next weeks. I have absolutely no idea how long this will take, so I’m gonna take it slow and make it the best I can.

Music will probably be a huge barrier - I know next to nothing about music composition, and I am always prone to being over-ambitious with these things. Wish me luck!

I also want to make some light promotional material for the game, and start sharing on socials more frequently with updates. Use the buttons below to follow!

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