Pico On-Ice

Pico On-Ice is a Pico-8 (playable on PC and the web) arcade game about figure skating. In the game, the player controls a figure skater that can jump and pirouette, or do both at once. A 30 second long routine is generated for each game and the player must attempt to perform each move in the order and during the time specified for the routine. The player is scored by closely they matched the routine, and fails if they hit the side of the rink.

This was my final project in a game design class I took taught Ian Bogost while I was at Georgia Tech. I was the sole developer on this project, and it was the culmination of multiple week-long game prototypes we made over the course of the term. Pico-8 games have a max number of characters their code base can use, can only contains a handful of colors, and only come with systems for rendering shapes and sprites, listening for input (restricted to 2 buttons and directional), handling windowing and playing sounds. For this game I had to write my own basic physics implementation, camera tracking of the avatar and scoring based on hitting the correct series of inputs during specific sections of the randomly generate routine. The only aspect of the game I did not create was the music, which I copied from a free collection of Pico-8 music