Enter the arena and test your skills! Pico Arena is a 2 player, top-down combat arena built with pico-8. 

Controls

• up/down/left/right: move
• x: shoot
• o: shield
• o + direction: dash attack
• o + x: shield burst

Weapons

• line: hitscan weapon that does 1 dmg and 1 tile of knockback
• cube: projectile weapon with an area of effect damage and knockback
  • projectile will explode on impact, or can be exploded at any time by pressing x
  • be careful not to hurt yourself with this weapon.

Rock, Paper, Scissor Mechanic

• shield beats line (if player 1 shoots player 2 while shielded, attack is reflected and player 1 takes damage)
• dash beats shield (if player 1 is shielded and player 2 dash attacks, player 1 takes damage)
• line beats dash (if player 1 is dashing and player 2 shoots, dash is cancelled and player 1 takes damage)

Dev Notes

This is my first Pico-8 game, and I had a blast making it. I quickly filled up the 8k token limit and was disappointed because there is so much more I wanted to add. I know I could play the token optimization game with Pico-8's token rules (strings are one token), but I wanted to keep the code human-readable. I will likely port to Löve2D to flesh out the game fully.

One cool thing I did in the code was to implement full integration tests. I instrumented the input function to enable a test to control input on a per frame level. This was super helpful in development, enabling test driven development, especially for frame-perfect scenarios that are difficult to test manually. Combined with Pico-8's built-in video recording, each test run output a gif where I can step through frame by frame to observe behavior. For fun I created a large `mosaic.gif` file of every test gif I created in the course of development, that shows the progression of each mechanic as I implemented them.

The code is all here: https://github.com/robcmills/pico-arena