Gluing everything together

The game is now both winnable (and losable) without cheating, though the cheats remain active for now to help with debugging specific game states. If you lose, you’re routed to a boring (but serviceable) “game over” screen.

If you win, you’re treated to a modest victory cutscene, which I’ll leave unspoiled.

Speaking of “no spoilers”, I’ve also been working on some easter eggs. And they work! But they also push me way over the PICO-8 16KB compressed code size limit. I spent a day or two attempting some heroic size optimizations, but ultimately it was the shrinko8 minifier that saved the day. I’ve isolated all the easter egg code so that it can be trivially stripped out to keep the “official” build commented and relatively readable, but at least I can keep the easter eggs for the “party build”.

My next focus will be adding a credits screen and some in-game help, and then revisiting the car-burying gameplay stage to make it a bit more challenging.