EGG

A Picosystem game

Introduction

EGG is my first game for the Pimoroni Picosystem. I hope it won't be the last, because I bought it specially.

It's heavily inspired by "Chuckie Egg", though the mechanics aren't the same, and once past level 1, you may find yourself in some strange places.

A major goal for this project was to make movement feel as fluid as it is in Chuckie Egg. It also keeps the "no air control" feature which Chuckie Egg and many 80s platformers had, which fell by the wayside with Mario but I find leads to some interesting tactics and emergent cool stuff.

I have simplified the scoring system severely. Essentially Chuckie Egg has three counters: your score, your lives and a time limit. But the score is really just a reflection of your progression, since most of it is a time bonus. In practice the key is to earn more extra lives than you lose playing through the levels, and the challenge is simply survival. So I have munged all three counters into a single health bar, which can be replenished with corn.

Level 1 may look familiar.

Another feature of EGG was inspired by a game I haven't even played: Hollow Knight. Like Chuckie Egg, EGG has 8 levels, but they don't repeat like they did in Chuckie Egg. So it's pretty easy to finish the game. You'll have to find your own way to increase the challenge.

Downloads

TODO: Picosystem build coming soon.

An SDL binary produced by the 32blit SDK that may or may not work on Linux computers

Conclusions

I am happy with the gameplay of EGG, but, _eheu!_, when I gave my Picosystem to a friend to play it, he managed to cause it to hang within 3 minutes. So it has bugs. Unfortunately it's also written in C, which means I have no idea how to debug it.

I would rather just rewrite it in a language I understand, but the Picosystem has no other working SDKs. So this project is on the shelf.