Overworld Controls:
◁ ▷ △ ▽ - Move
Ⓧ - Interact, continue dialog
Ⓞ - Speed up dialog
Combat controls:
◁ ▷ △ ▽ - Change selection
Ⓧ - Activate
Ⓞ - Cancel / Back
Standard Pico-8 keyboard assignments:
Arrow keys = ◁ ▷ △ ▽
Z,C,N = Ⓞ
X,V,M = Ⓧ
P,Enter = Pause menu (useful for resetting the game to play it again)
For the best experience, take the time to try interacting with all the objects, too!
Have fun catting around!
Thank you everyone for your support.
Here's my post-jam development diary / full disclosure wrap-up thing:
Nora is my mascot character. She was thoughtfully designed ahead of time to be the epitome of adorable innocence. The large art at the top of the post is actually a piece of rough concept art for her that I worked together with an artist to produce, and it actually took a bit of work to get her to where she is today.
I had been meaning to flesh out her world and create additional characters to play off of her personality for a while now, and I figured the jam would be a perfect way to motivate myself to get something out there.
I was actually hoping all along that I'd get to make an RPG, because RPGs are rare on the Pico-8. When jam theme voting came up, I cast a dual vote for Blob and Useless Power-up. That way, if Blob was selected, I would benefit by having standard RPG slimes to fight against (and cute moe blobs for characters!) while everyone else foolishly used the built-in circle tool to try and do wacky blob physics games. And if Nora gets a Useless Powerup instead I could easily make that an RPG McGuffin of some kind... So either way I'm good, right? With that settled, I began work on pixel art.
And then the jam turned out to be about Chain Reaction. Crap.
How am I supposed to make these 16x16 pixel overworld walking catgirl sprites into the embodiment of a "chain reaction"? At first I doubled-back, thought I could change my design into another charming but simple puzzle game where you place a dog to move forward and scare a cat, which moves away from the dog to scare a mouse, which moves away from the cat to collect the cheese... That's a puzzle game, right? I have vague memories of a puzzle game like that actually existing at some point, but I couldn't remember the details to really make it work... It would be boring to make a puzzle game if I can't figure out any intricacies to make it require some thought! At any rate, the first early alpha version went by this design (see "Earlier versions:" below), hence the little info box which is now missing from the current version of the header image.
Uh oh. It looks like someone else had the same idea as me, and they seem to remember the rules better than I do as well. It was a game about using a mouse to scare an elephant into a cage or something, right?
Well, since I don't want to risk my jam entry being redundant and I don't remember how to make that fun anyway, I'm back to figuring out how to make an RPG with a "chain reaction" twist. The results became the finished product: A battle system where instead of selecting the attack you want to use (so that you can just spam the enemy's weakness over and over), you have to figure out how to connect multiple attacks together into a big chain to deal significant damage.
My fatal mistake was trying to keep the overworld aspect of the game, rather than just focusing on the combat system. Because this project was still about fleshing out Nora's world, which was important to me. I already had sprites for all four directions set up, so it would be a waste to throw them away changing my plans again, right?
I ended up working obsessively, pouring hours into this project all week long, slowly adding more dialogue, more rooms, more scenery objects... Then I realized my second mistake: The combat system is like nothing anyone has ever seen before, so it needs a full proper tutorial before people will grasp how to use it. And if you don't know how to play, you can't win the game.
After packing a full tutorial, a bunch of overworld NPCs and dialogue, a wacky scripting system for dialog-triggered events and the like, and then finally getting around to implimenting skills to use up your MP and drastically reduce the luck factor for players who know what they're doing, all in a newfangled object-oriented system that uses up more code space for the sake of making everything much easier to handle and find your way around...
I ran out of tokens. Oops.
So, the finished product ended up having only two battles (I had planned a third, final boss, with gimmicks and a true ending) and thus was very light on gameplay despite being packed to the brim with solid content. If I had instead only made the combat screen and cycled through enemies randomly (including recolors), I could've had potentially endless hours of gameplay. Instead it's something short and cute that you play once and never touch again, much like my previous Pico-8 Jam entry, Frog Home.
I guess I just love to tell a story.