Safe Crackers

Dive into the world of fast-paced safecracking with Safe Crackers! Armed with nothing but your wits and a mysterious one-button gadget, you’ll spin, time, and crack your way through increasingly challenging safes whilst uncovering quirky treasures.

A single button stands between you and glory, are you ready to become the ultimate safecracker?

Controls

X - that is all! Note - on some controllers this may map differently, on an xbox controller PICO's X key maps to B, for example.

About

My submission to the 2024 1-Button Game Jam. Built using PICO-8. I had two goals in this jam:

1. Improve my understanding of trigonometry in the context of game development; hence the circle based mechanics.
2. Get more familiar with PICO-8:
   1. Memory. Whilst I didn't end up doing anything too advanced in this game with memory, my research during the jam means I have a much better understanding of how PICO handles memory having used tools like Memsplore.
   2. Graphics. early versions of this game had me playing around with patterns in PICO, inverting the fill pattern by poking the correct memory address and then bit-shifting the pattern in memory to emulate the feel of a rotating dial. Ultimately I couldn't get the effect I wanted so this never made it into production, but it was fun nonetheless!

I built out two modes (story & endless) as part of this, the story mode was an excuse for me to explore adding more "dials" onto the screen at any one time to see how this would work from a gameplay perspective.

I had a lot of fun with this jam and I learnt a lot, so I hope you enjoy playing!

Info & Credits

Dialog library from this PICO-8 cart by: Rusty Bailey

Chat-GPT was used for helping with some of the coding and padding out dialog.

Colour-blindness was tested using Coloroblis

Many thanks to everyone who helped play test!