Safe Crackers
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:
- Improve my understanding of trigonometry in the context of game development; hence the circle based mechanics.
- Get more familiar with PICO-8:
- 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.
- 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
- Variable Width Font by: beanborg
- 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!
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Very nice Pop-the-Lock style game. The story mode with the multiple locks was a cool edition. The only thing I'd change is some sort of timer on the endless. A very solid game for a 1-button Jam!
Thanks for playing! Appreciate the feedback 🙂
i played endless first and had quite a bit of fun, but then i tried story and it was really fun having two positions to focus on! i love how i have to recognise which lock to finish first
That's very, very cool! It would be nice to develop a game like this further. It could turn out to be something incredibly cool.
Really nice concept and execution, I especially enjoyed the writing in Story Mode, although I agree with one of the comments here regarding the legibility issues due to the font choice. Still, pretty cool game!
Thanks for playing! With the jam extension I decided to incorporate your feedback on the font into the game and have updated a new version that makes it slightly more legible (mainly just the M's), I looked into doing a whole new font but would require too many changes at this point.
Hopefully a bit more readable now, thanks for the feedback!
very much like pop the lock
Pretty good game.
The font is a bit hard to read. In early 2024 I've made a game that used similar font and got a lot of feedback from friends about text readability. After that all my future games use modern fonts. It is a question whenever you want to sacrifice user experience for an artistic vision or not. In my opinion keep this game as is, but in future try to plan around more readable fonts.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Yes agreed the font isn't easy to read unfortunately it's the PICO-8's default font, and loading in a custom font is a whole process unto itself! Will keep in mind for future games :)
As there was a jam extension I decided to update the readability of the font, thanks again for the feedback :)
Wow, that's really gooood. Many great ideas, and a flawless execution. I first got to 64 in endless mode and then discovered the story mode, which is awesome. The double action is crazy, I solved a few of them but it ends up being super hard :D :D
Congratulations!!