• fixed the game on lexaloffle, I had an issue with a function because I was programming on an older verison of pico8 (here nothing changes because I exported the html with the version I had)
  
• made the arcade button red in the menu to incentivize people to try that mode too, it ruins a bit the aesthetic of the homescreen but I think is fine (I could just place it first in the menu but I like having wave as a sort of campaign)
• made the game a lil easier in the beginning
• also I just posted it on lexaloffle (here)

The first gamemode (wave) is made of 9 waves and when you beat the boss you win

The arcade one (the coolest one) is a mix of waves and enemies just randomly spawning on the screen you get xp killing them and when you level up you can choose 1 of 3 cards to upgrade your ship there isn't really a way to win but I've scripted the waves till lvl 18 and then it gets random and progressively crazy hard

I followed the tutorials without a lot of changes to the game so at the start of the jam I had to choose what to do with the game I already had, I felt really inspired playing stick it to the stickman  and I wanted some similar mechanics in my game, I decided to keep the wave game mode as some kind of "campaign" in which u could win the game and then add the mechanic I wanted in a new infinite game mode. I considered having just one game mode but I didn't think it would change remarkably in terms of token because for the new game I'd still have to copy most the code (I also considered starting from scratch but it seemed to much work), I struggled a little with the token limit in the last days but I guess that no matter what I would still probably have reached it.
Also a few times I lost sight of the vision and just started to add whatever came to mind in the game, I think I should have dedicated more time in the beginning into planning what power ups I wanted in the game and how they could interact with each other (e.g., the xp boost is almost useless it just makes you go faster through the game I thought it made sense when I introduced it in the game because the difficulty was time based while now is level based but still it didn’t really add much to the gameplay)

One interesting tradeoff I had is that the token limitation made me think about writing most of the code in a string and then turning it into code with a function, turning for example an array in a string and then have a function go through it and create the array or do it for function parameters, decreasing the readability of the code. (I only reached the limit toward the end so I only used it in a few arrays that I knew I would probably never modify again)

(English isn’t my first language and I’m writing this after testing and debugging the game, if there are some mistakes I’m sorry and pls let me know also wow that's a lot of text)

The game is being made for the basic shmup showcase jam

Thanks to all the people who already tested the game or are going to test it and to Krystman for the amazing tutorials

(if you find some errors / you have suggestion for this webpage or the game feel free to leave a comment or a message somewhere)

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