pico-8 valentine

Reach the end to receive your valentine surprise 💖

I made this tiny game as an exercise to familiarize myself with the PICO-8 platform.

The idea was to create a simple game that would serve as the setup for a greeting/valentine card (thus "interactive valentine card").

The basic controls and collision stem from the micro platformer tutorial (link).

I thought it would be fun to double this project as a tutorial for creating the featured particle effect in PICO-8. You will find a detailed documentation of the code inside the cartridge.

The basic idea is to scale a sprite from size 0 to X (however large it should become), and shift its position by a movement vector each frame (determining the speed and direction of movement). The movement vector is based on a random point on the unit circle (direction) that is multiplied by a scaling factor (speed).