Unleashed is a casual infinite runner created for the Pico8 where you play as a dog getting chased by its owner. The further you get without getting caught, and the more bones you collect along the way, the higher your score. As simple as that.
Here is a small demo where you can see the dog running, dodging obstacles, collecting bones, and eventually getting caught by its owner after colliding with a car:
You can try it out online here.
Here is the cartridge for the game, which can actually be downloaded and played in the Pico8:
P.S. Yes, this PNG image contains the entire game. Pretty neat if you ask me. 😎
Developing this game was a lot of fun! The limitations of the Pico8, technical and otherwise, make developing for this fantasy console a very entertaining challenge. Plus, I personally find the retro aesthetic of the IDE and the Pico8 games very cool and charming.
Unfortunately, I don't think the game is as fun to play as I would have liked, as some of its mechanics are a little bit clunky, in my opinion. Not only that, but the code is a total disaster, so by the end of development I kinda hated my own creation. 🙈
As anyone can see, the game itself isn't that complex (it's quite simple, actually), but little by little its code grew into a convoluted mess that ended up occupying more than 8k tokens – I didn't even try to be mindful of the number of tokens because I naively assumed that I would never need them all, yet here we are.
Part of the problem was that I knew/know very little about Lua and Pico8, which was made worse by the fact that I am too lazy to learn things properly, as I prefer to just wing it. However, apart from my own incompetence, I believe that the main issue was that the project changed directions a hundred times during development, resulting in the messy code you can see here.
In any case, enough with the negatives. As I mentioned at the start, working on this project was a blast, so I might still come back to the Pico8 in the future with some fresh ideas and some lessons learned.