8-Bit Panda sequel?

[The-Beesh-Spweesh]

Will you ever start development on a sequel to this game? I'd obviously like it to be good as possible!

I have some suggestions:

• New graphics and levels
• New power-ups
• Bosses
• New music
• Leverage SCN() and OVR() (special functions you've never bothered using)
• Re-use some XL VM stuff from Shadow Over the Twelve Lands, perhaps for entity logic?
• Perhaps allow other people to design the graphics, levels, and compose the music?

My brother came up with a "blue bamboo" power-up that when enemies are hit, they should freeze in ice for a little bit. When the ice breaks, it should have an animation for cracking and breaking into tiny pieces, then let the enemy free when it breaks. It should also be on a timer like the yellow bamboo power-up.

He also came up with springs that bounce the player up really high.

[btco]

Hey! Yeah, I actually plan to work on 8 Bit Panda 2 at some point (should be it be called 16-bit panda? :) ).

When I created 8 bit panda I didn't really know a lot about TIC-80 (or fantasy consoles in general), so my graphics/effects were pretty basic. If I do a sequel I'll try to make it more polished. Definitely with bosses, etc.

As for XLVM from SO12L, maybe I won't need it -- SO12L has a ton of content, especially text; a platformer doesn't need that much.

Thanks!

[The-Beesh-Spweesh]

Thanks for the response! The 65535-character limit of the TIC-80 is really constraining for that big of a game to even be made at all. At one point during development, you'll need to have something to help out with this bottleneck.

"16-Bit Panda" sounds cool! It should be this way! Because the 8-Bit Panda's engine is more basic and limited in how it works, and you've already nailed the available coding space you had, the 16-Bit sequel should definitely use code compression!

About SCN() and OVR():

• SCN() is called after TIC(), and can be used to do various horizontal effects to the final TIC-layer image (e.g. gradients, mapping palettes to different sections, wave effects, and even those classic ZX Spectrum-style border effects). It is called 136 times to iterate over all 136 lines of the TIC-80 screen.
• OVR() draws a foreground layer separate from the TIC layer. This layer is unaffected by SCN() and can't have a screen offset. With this, combined with SCN(), we can have 2912 colors on-screen at once!

[YusufSuleman]

I can recreate this in Unreal Engine.

[joshgoebel]

OVR() draws a foreground layer separate from the TIC layer. This layer is unaffected by SCN() and can't have a screen offset. With this, combined with SCN(), we can have 2912 colors on-screen at once!

FYI: The author has expressed some minor regret at adding this [OVR]... so it may come back out (or change quite a bit) in a future release. Though I suppose "backwards compatibility" will guarantee that it sticks around long after it goes away (if it does)... Personally I try to pretend it doesn't exist, but to each their own. :-)

Technically there are all sorts of issues with it in that it doesn't respect the "fantasy" (it doesn't write to VRAM, the OVR palette doesn't exist anywhere in RAM, etc) - it is just kind of pure "magic"... but I suppose such things might bother some more than others.