Anxiety-inducing Pico-1K game

IMPORTANT - TRIGGER WARNING: this game contains heavy flashing lights and colours.

CONTROLS: use your arrows to move, catch whatever appears on the screen. That's it.

Yesterday night I bought Pico-8 on a whim. This is the result.

I developed this game for the PICO-1K Jam. While it's obviously really basic, it was really interesting to work with the jam's constraint of max. 1024 characters. In the end, I managed to fit all the game within the given limits (the Pico-8 editors says it's 991 characters, this byte counter says 995 characters, 1011 bytes), while also keeping the code fairly legible. Below you can find the full code. Let me know what you think of it!

Game graphics inspired by Yume Nikki's Neon World and Jesse Jacobs' Crawl Space.

rcs={{d1=31,d2=32},{d1=21,d2=42},{d1=11,d2=52}} c,w,i=0,0,0 p={x=32,y=32} a={x=-9,y=-9} h=true d=h poke(0x5f2c,3)cls() ?"\asdl02i4v3d1c#" ?"\asdl0ci4v3e.....b-1" ?"\asdl0ci6v3c1.c...e3...c1" t=time() function _update() for r in all(rcs)do r.d1-=1 r.d2+=1 if(r.d1<0)r.d1=31 if(r.d2>63)r.d2=32 end i+=1 h=flr(i/45)%2<1 if(h)then d=h a.x=flr(rnd(12))*5 a.y=10+flr(rnd(10))*5 end nx=p.x ny=p.y if(btnp(⬆️))ny-=5 if(btnp(⬇️))ny+=5 if(btnp(⬅️))nx-=5 if(btnp(➡️))nx+=5 p.x=mid(2,nx,57) p.y=mid(12,ny,57) if(not h and d)then if(flr((p.x-2)/5)==flr(a.x/5) and flr((p.y-2)/5)==flr(a.y/5)) then h=true d=false c+=1 end end end function _draw() cls() tt=20-time()+t+c*4 f=8+flr(rnd(5)) if(tt<0)then?"you made "..c.." pts",2,29,f else for r in all(rcs) do rect(r.d1,r.d1,r.d2,r.d2,8+flr(rnd(5))) end circfill(p.x,p.y,2) ?c.."\0" ?tt,36,0 if(not h and d)rectfill(a.x+1,a.y+1,a.x+3,a.y+3,8) circfill(p.x-1,p.y-1,0.5,14) circfill(p.x+1,p.y-1,0.5,14) end end