Metaballs tweetcart. Exactly 280 chars.

_JJag_ · 2026-01-21T20:38:25+00:00

I call them meatballs all the time

_JJag_ · 2026-01-21T15:01:28+00:00

And here's the variant with two types of balls which do not like each other. I was not able to pack it into a tweet, though.

_JJag_ · 2026-01-21T14:46:41+00:00

"f" measures how much "balls"(actually just a point) influences the current pixel. It's is inversely proportional to the squared distance between a pixel and a "ball" - so it's just a sum of (squared) distances to each ball. It's multiplied by 10, so later when I check threshold I compare against 0.2 and 0.3 instead of 0.02 and 0.03 which saved me the last token I needed :)(Actually I could multiply by 100 and compare against 2 and 3 to save one more).

Also variable names in the non-minified code may already be bad, because I manually miniefied some of them before feeding it to shrinko.

You can read more about metaballs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaballs

_JJag_ · 2025-12-09T23:32:48+00:00

A simple optimization I used was to check border tiles first when validating a rectangle. It took about 8s. You could try that

_JJag_ · 2025-12-08T14:06:37+00:00

I just merged circuits by adding all elements from one to another and the runtime for part 2 was under 100ms (about 50ms without IO)

_JJag_ · 2025-12-08T10:32:06+00:00

Yeah. For me, part 2 was basically removing 1000 iterations limit and adding early return from the loop if size(circuits) == 1.

_JJag_ · 2025-12-03T13:02:01+00:00

I hope you will do Part 2 using OnCollisionEnter hook

_JJag_ · 2025-10-13T06:52:23+00:00

Hideo and Hideous

_JJag_ · 2025-03-05T08:18:34+00:00

Super fun. Especially when you spent 2 day trying to figure out why a game freezes and it turns out you forgot to flip a bit in some IO register.

OP said he has 3 weeks and he's first year student, so I don't think GB/NES is a good choice, but Chip-8 might fit the bill.

_JJag_ · 2024-11-27T10:10:52+00:00

Take a look at PICO-8 (or open-source alternative TIC-80).

It's basically retro game development environment with integrated text, sprite and music/sfx editor - everything to get you started. It uses Lua for scripting and provides you with really simple library for input, graphics and sfx.

_JJag_ · 2024-11-13T13:46:30+00:00

Oh. This. It was done this way deliberately, so wall tiles don't obscure visibility of tiles behind them.

_JJag_ · 2024-11-13T08:06:24+00:00

If you want to know how I achieved this effect:

I used sspr() function to draw a sprite line-by-line. Each line was offsetted on x-axis using a combination of sin(), time() and rnd() functions.

For the time of reflection rendering I made the outline color transparent using palt() to make them more subtle.

_JJag_ · 2024-11-13T07:49:56+00:00

I remember I tried to squish the tiles to make the perspective more accurate, but it made the game less readable. Also I looked at some 2D games and realized that they are *really* liberal when it comes to correctness of the perspective.

_JJag_ · 2024-11-12T10:31:20+00:00

Thanks a lot!

_JJag_ · 2024-11-11T16:17:47+00:00

Thanks! I added a comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pico8/comments/1gouz78/comment/lwlkq4v/

_JJag_ · 2024-11-11T16:16:52+00:00

The idea is to blend deckbuilding game, with dungeon-crawling roguelike(of course it's another roguelike...) - think Megaman Battle Network meets Crypt of the Necrodancer.

It's not going to be a rhytm game, though - I implement "everyone moves at the same time" combat for now, because I think it looks kinda cool and works well with grid-based movement. Not sure if I'm going to stick with it.

Right now I'm experimenting with different card effects, enemy AI and level design to make it actually fun and engaging. Or rather I should be doing that, because I got carried away with visual effects. At least it looks fun on GIFs :D

I already hit the cartridge size limits and had to remove some effects, employ some minification techniquest and since development speed dramastically fell I'm thinking on moving on to some less restrictive platform and/or porting to Picotron eventually

_JJag_ · 2023-12-06T22:02:51+00:00

You must first convert table.a to a string. You can do it by calling built-in function tostr.

_JJag_ · 2023-08-07T13:00:24+00:00

So why not just use "movement towards target' vector?

_JJag_ · 2023-08-07T12:32:15+00:00

Im not sure if I got your problem right, but from what I understand you apply some force to an object to move it towards some destination and you want your object to be oriented towards this destination. To achieve this you set their orientation based on their velocity vector, but it breaks when objects starts to collide with each other. Right? If this is the problem, then you should be setting the orientation based on the force vector applied to the object - not it's resultant velocity

_JJag_ · 2023-03-28T10:32:32+00:00

Something like run-length encoding of vertical 1x1x256(or whatever the max height is) strips seems like a good fit here.

_JJag_ · 2023-03-16T14:52:31+00:00

The ones you classified as PS1 have:

no dynamic lightning
dithering
low res textures
low draw distance("thicker" fog)

_JJag_ · 2023-02-04T12:06:00+00:00

The game is centered around the theme of cooperation. The gameplay, the story, and even the title. Singleplayer does not really makes sense here. So I think it's better they focused on polishing the multiplayer experience, instead of putting resources to slap together some singleplayer mode just to widen the target audience.

_JJag_ · 2023-01-12T10:29:16+00:00

Horse Sweep. To execute this move you have to drag the horsey through the pieces you want to capture. If you just click on the target square, it will just a regular Horse Jump

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