Collisions and Procedurally Generated Placenames

I had to put the game down for about a week since I last posted. First my laptop's charger had a frayed cable and I had to wait for a new replacement to arrive by mail. Then I began the first week of the semester at school and just had too many things going on. Now that the week of classes are wrapped I felt free to get back to this.

So my first task was to implement collisions. I had (mistakenly) assumed there was built-in collision detection of sprites and so I'd be able to implement this in a single built-in function call. Unfortunately, not true! There is such a thing using flags for sprites on a set map, but that doesn't help us here since the level is procedurally generated. Personally, I think it would be better if Pico-8 had a constraint for a built-in collision-detection function call, but in any case, I implemented the straightforward collision detection model as described in this article. This is pretty much what I implement when I'm working in p5.js if I'm not taking advantage of the p5.play library (which hasn't seen an update in a few years).

So with collision detection on, I then implemented a very simple procedural text generation. Like, entry-level beginner level. I used two lists of words from Darius Kazemi's Corpora repo to create a name like X of X. Basically, I was trying to create names like the Museum of Illusion, Museum of Pizza, and other ridiculous touristy/basic-you-know-what instagram museums.

I also added some simple sound effects for collision and a weirdo not-impressive startup song when the game begins.

The current playable game is 0.2

So at this point I have a basic procedurally generated tiny village, randomly selected player sprite, and you can walk with arrows keys. When you attempt to walk into a building it displays the building name. It randomly produces this each time, so when you walk into the same building again you see a different name. I should make this persistent instead. I am trying to decide if I want to keep pushing on with this file and make the quiltlike rpg adventure game I had originally visioned or stop here. We'll see what I do next, but if it's been some time and you've seen no progress, you'll know.