I didn't like stock at all. It felt chunky and slow for me.
I'm currently digging into MuOS ( https://muos.dev ) , liking it so far! It also has @zep#pico8 support, you simply download the binaries and it runs natively. This is a huge plus for me.
MuOS's menu is not as eye-candy like Batocera, but fast, highly customizable, and works nicely.
Tracking down an extremely annoying hiscore bug. Haven't been able to pinpoint where I've gone wrong with the calculations though, conversions seem to be working fine. Hmm. Gotta keep hunting.
Simultaneous play in Billabong is just too frantic. A game can be over in seconds. I'm thinking to slow it down by limiting each player to only one flow in progress at any one time, and slowing down the flows so that players have more opportunity to block flows that can capture a large amount of the maze.
On the plus side, the game creates some really pretty patterns.
I'm extending the game I wrote for #TweetTweetJam. I've added different map styles, support for up to four simultaneous players, gamepad control, and a single-player mode against computer-controlled opponents.
I got SO frustrated at one point at #amaze2024. There was a great panel about how we don't have control over the engines and tools we use. About how small, open source engines are the way to do that.
They lamented the closure of walled gardens like Flash (I fear for Dreams in a hopefully far future), and how much culture is lost to the whims of the market.
They mentioned the contradiction of user vs corporate interests. They mentioned open source as an example to follow.
I mentioned Pico-8 as an example. I LOVE the thing. And yet, isn't it susceptible to oblivion, being proprietary? Isn't it another walled garden that one day will close?
I guess those games published as HTML or binary will still be playable but how about the ones playable only through splore?
As long as we keep making games in proprietary walled gardens, those games, those engines, won't belong to us and could (and will) disappear.
@kednar I'm not too worried about #pico8 in this respect. For one, its capabilities are so well-documented by now that people have been making compatible binary implementations for a while. The .p8 format is also very well understood and documented. If it suddenly went away, I'd count the weeks (if not days) before someone had an open source feature-compatible implementation up and running for people to use. I also suspect zep might open the code at some point far, far down the road. Maybe.
I've been taking @pikuma's incredible 3D graphics programming from scratch course. I reached the part where we've made a basic spinning cube and I wanted to try implementing it in #pico8