v1.4: pause indicator + deluxe edition!

It’s been so fun watching people post scores and figure out how to get good at the game – a real treat to see others enjoying the game as much as I have. Someone even beat my highscore! But only temporarily; I got a crazy seed while idly testing this update. As far as I know, I currently hold the record >:) (update: apparently not!)

Anyway, let me tell you about the pause indicator I’ve added to the game, and the deluxe edition of Make Ten I’ve been working on.

pause% indicator

If you pause while playing, your score now changes color. That’s it! A small change in the end, considering the days I’ve spent idly thinking about it, and how long it took me to fit the feature into the 500-character limit… trying to add anything at this point is like squeezing blood from a stone.

I considered some alternatives, like blanking the screen during pausing, or force-restarting when you pause, but they seemed too heavy-handed. The timer is an important part of the intended experience, but its easy to sidestep it by pausing. Now, I don’t mind if you’d rather make your own experience and play “pause%” – go right ahead! But I like this new color change – it helps signal my intent, and helps players know what they’re comparing against when they see others’ screenshots. I hope it strikes a nice balance of being guiding yet non-judgemental.

coming soon: Make Ten Deluxe

And now, an announcement: I’ve been working on an expanded version of the game! It’s basically an expansion pack with a dozen or two alternate versions of Make Ten. Some game modes are slight modifications to the rules (make42! it’s hellish, I hate it), some are puzzley modes (undo! no timer!), and some take the game to some really wild places (explosions! gravity!)

The components of each game mode (timer, undo, explosions, goal number, etc) are separate little modules, and I’m planning on exposing them to players, so you can make your own custom versions of Make Ten. (will the expanded version be called “Make Make Ten”? hopefully not, that sounds like a mouthful)

The main focus of Make Ten Deluxe will be 10 curated alternate modes, alongside 10 or 20 other even-more-alternate modes (I think of it as 10 fun modes plus another 10+ curiosities, joke modes, etc. more of a peek into the workshop rather than a pack of greatest hits)

It’ll be out soon – within the next week hopefully. I’m planning to put it up for sale for a couple of dollars. I hope you enjoy it! (edit: very late due to illness. and a bunch of scope creep, oops. still coming tho!)

gems from the code mines

Before this change, the code was 490 chars. I don’t want to go into too much detail, I tend to ramble. But in short, I saved 5 chars in various places and then invented two new techniques to make enough room for the pause indicator:

• I’m using pico8 glyph values as color values, letting me initialize and change them very compactly. Here’s the code I used to see what color each glyph would be: for i=1,26 do print(chr(96+i),_𝘦𝘯𝘷[chr(127+i)]&15) end
• I replaced the timer – it used to be drawn with a rectfill() (8 entire characters just for the function name, 8 characters ripe for harvesting…) but now it’s, uh, a bunch of block glyphs clipped and smushed together, slowly driving offscreen: ?"\^x2\*b█",-t()-5,106. See the pico8 manual for more info on those cryptic codes. This ended up saving 3 chars over rectfill, although your results may vary.

If you’ve written or seen other carts that used similar techniques, let me know! I got the idea to clip the glyphs (so they would form one continuous rectangle) from JadeLombax’s Quest for the Master Sword – try typing ?"\^y3¥¥¥",8 into PICO-8, it’s such a cute and clever drawing method.

fun fact!

Did you know: Make Ten was released on May 10th! It wasn’t on purpose, I only just realized it myself.

Alright, bye now! Thanks for reading