Jello

Fine Tuning the Game Feel

For this week's pico-8 game, we need to implement a behavior for a character of our choice. The character can be as simple as a circle, but its behavior should bound to a single verb, corresponding to a single button. Then we need to tune the behavior to achieve a "good" or "interesting" game feel.

I am always fascinated by how jelly fish swim, thus I decided to recreate that behavior in Pico-8. I looked at videos of jelly fish online, and started implement this behavior on a pink circle. To make my life easier, I implemented a simple state machine in Lua, and used different states to define my behaviors, such as "jump_start", "jump_accelerate", "jump_slow", etc.

After I am satisfy with how the pink ball behave, I started to create the sprites of the jelly fish. I realized that once I added the sprite, the behavior feels much different! So I had to go back and tune again. When I added a sprite for the beginning "bulge" state, I found myself tuning the variables again.

Lastly, I decided to add a sound effect to make the game feel better. I tried out all the sound waves in pico-8 built-in sound library and picked the one that feels the best for a jelly fish. Luckily, it improved the game feel without me having to tune the variables again.

Controls:

• Use z to swim upwards
• Left/right arrow keys to move around.

Read more and download my pico-8 cartridges here: game blog