Memory Leak (Moracan)

In Memory Leak, your job is to keep your company's database clean and neatly organized. However, someone tampered with it, and the data has been erased! Using the hints on the sides of the database, fill the database with the correct data in each spot and restore it to its former glory!

Memory Leak is a PICO-8 version of a famous logic puzzle named Towers. This digital version of that puzzle includes randomly generated puzzles, customizable board sizes (3x3 to 6x6), a hint system to help newcomers to Towers and graphics that aren't simply numbers, they're numbers on towers. With color!

Features

• Endless randomly generated puzzles
• Customizable board size, tackle the laughably easy 3x3 boards all the way to the indomitable 6x6 boards!
• Integrated time and move counter
• Visual cues to help you realize why what you just did was wrong
• Hint system, reveal random tiles of the board
• Shapes moving on the bottom right of the board (no one knows what they're for)
• UI?
• Sound effects?!
• NOT music! Woo!

Controls

Arrow keys to move the highlighted tile

X key to increase height / select option in menu

Z key to decrease height

Rules

If you've never played Towers, here are the basics:

This game features an empty board that you need to fill with towers of different heights. This game is similar to Sudoku, in that there can only be one tile of each height on each row and column.

To fill the heights, you need to use the hints at the sides; these hints tell you how many towers are "visible" when looking at the board from that side. Higher towers cover smaller ones.

For example, the row "2 5 4 1 3   X", when looked at from the X, would show a total of 3 towers.

The game has some visual cues to let you know what's happening:

• A black tile indicates that the tile is repeated in its row or column. Only 1 tile of each height can be on each row or column.
• A grey hint indicates that it has been solved. A row or column with both hints grey is considered solved (although, it might not be correct anyways!).
• A red hint indicates that the row is full, but it has not been solved.

On the main screen, you can set the board size. Default size is 5x5 tiles, but you can make it 3x3, 4x4 or 6x6 tiles as well, if you'd like. 3x3 is incredibly easy, while 6x6 might be too complicated, or straight up impossible...

There are also 2 options you can enable (green) or disable (red):

Move board: When enabled, makes the whole board move when increasing/decreasing tower height. Disable it if it makes you feel dizzy.

Enable hints: When enabled, allows you to get a hint by holding Z and X at the same time. When used, a hint will reveal a random tower from the board. There is no limit to how many hints you can use and it in no way affects anything, so use as many as you like! :)

Credits

Memory Leak was a project I started 9 months ago, right after publishing my first game, 40 Parsec Delivery, but never got to finish and publish, even though it was essentially done. I recently found it again, so I decided to give it some final polishing touches and finally post it.

Arguably, the UI still needs some work, however I sadly forgot what past me was thinking when doing this so I'm too scared to touch the code too much, lol. However, I feel that the main gameplay is still fairly polished and definitely enjoyable, if you are a fan of Towers or logic puzzles in general. If you find any bugs, let me know!

Special thanks to zep.p8 (Lexaloffle) for making PICO-8, and Lazy Devs Academy for their amazing PICO-8 tutorials!

Also, if you are a fan of logic puzzles like me, you will love Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection! It in fact was a big inspiration for this project!

Some fonts used in this project:

• Mizu Font Alphabet by sk89q
• Drid Herder by Iconian Fonts