Lovebyte 2024: Mini writeups

Introduction:

We didn't have a whole lot of productions coming into the party, except for a 128 byte intro that had been sitting in shelves some time and a few out-of-compo side-projects. It didn't help that we were quite busy with preparing the party as well as me working pretty much fulltime on the 1K Dash Intro to be released at Forever Party, However, in the end we still ended up with a few nice releases as I was able to get two more things partycoded.

Volta (128 Bytes, MicroW8):

This intro had been sitting on the shelves for a while and came about after porting our Sharded Intro to the MicroW8 and realising that there was still a bit of space left on this port that could potentially be used for sound and progression. Therefore this intro uses the same basic techique as the Sharded fractal, but adds sound and sync by changing its shape and color over time.

I'm happy how this one turned out in terms of progression, sound sync and shape variations.

Stasis (256 Bytes game, MicroW8):

After releasing our tiny game Bytestorm at Lovebyte 2021, I always wanted to try doing vertical shoot'em up game as well at some point. But whereas Bytestorm sadly was a bit light on the gameplay, i'm happy to say that this time i was able to get some more gameplay elements added like shooting enemy waves and keeping track of their visibility.

The development for this game first went through a PICO-8 and TIC-80 version before landing on the MicroW8.

Pygmy (256 Bytes Executable Graphics, Atari XE/XL):

This production was partycoded during the friday night of Lovebyte 2024. At this time there were almost no oldschool tiny executable graphics delivered and I was starting to fear we wouldn't have enough entries for a compo, so i started this entry using the same technology we had built for Dozer, our tiny executable graphics from Lovebyte 2023.

I worked all night on 2 different ideas (One being the Seahorse and the other one an Eagle) and presented those to Blossom, Rho and Sensenstahl in the morning.

All of them seemed to prefer the seahorse and Blossom already went as far as finding a nice name and slide description for the entry. However i thought that the problem with the seahorse-idea was that it had a large empty portion of the screen where nothing was hapenning.

So i had to come up with a few ideas to generate extra graphics in almost no space available, like the diagonal line (using the atari sprites) and talked to Sensenstahl about the positioning of the seahorse and lines, which were positioned in such a way that it suggested the existence of air bubbles and a small fish on the lefthand side of the screen.

PICO-32 (Tiny intro EP, PICO-8):

Normally Fantasy Consoles don't lend themselves well to the tiniest of filesizes. But coming out of the Tiny Code Christmas, i worked on a bunch of super-tiny PICO-8 programs, of which i was able to select four that ended up in this compilation.

The sourcecode for all of the 4 intros is presented in the video.

Ancoral8 / WeWereWatching8 (8 Bytes, ZX Spectrum):

These 2 intros were made as complement examples for my seminar on Extreme ZX Spectrum coding.

* WeWereWatching8 is a 8 byte remake of the very first 16 byte intro for ZX Spectrum
* Ancoral8 is a 8 byte version of my original Ancoral intro for Lovebyte Turbo

Oscill8r (8 Bytes, DOS):

Lovebyte is always a nice excuse to release another 8 byter using my favorite trick, the xlatb flip-flop, so here you go :D

And here is the sourcecode:
les ax,[si]
frameloop:
xlatb
stosw
add di,ax
jmp frameloop

Conclusion:

I'm really happy that i was still able to submit some nice entries among all the chaos of dealing with our personal situation, lovebyte organisation and working on Dash.

For more information about all the Lovebyte 2024 releases, you can find them at demozoo

- Enjoy!

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