Randy's Rowdy Rocket Roundup

Posted 04/04/2022

Some time last year I discovered Pico-8 and made a tiny asteroids-like to get a handle on things. It ended up being fun enough that I decided to port it to a proper desktop version in C++, using Raylib for the game parts. I hacked it together pretty quick so code is gross, but it's a good little timewaster. I think my original implementation was a bit cooler because the asteroids were a little more interesting, but the fun thing about simple stuff like this is you get to cheat and collide everything just in terms of a radius; collision on the player is super tiny I think. For some reason one of the bigger pains was the powerup system but I believe it was largely because the code is spaghetti, I'm actually almost embarrased to have made the source public.

I'm much more comfortable with SDL now so I plan to remake it again once I get around to it. The music and sound effects were made in the Pico-8 audo editor, funny enough -- it's easy enough to work with and I know nothing about audio production. Raylib was fun because it made it pretty easy to hop right in with what's basically a GLFW front-end, but I'm not sure if I'm gonna stick with it. It's a good project overall though, and you should check it out.

If you'd like to check it out, I put it here on Github, including a Windows build. I don't have a Windows machine anymore, so if you run into issues with the provided build, or an attempt at your own, bug me on Github, I'm still working on getting email together.