Oh no! More bones 4k releasedPrint page

It's the third time I've approached this title and the limitations of 4 kilobytes. It's a hard requirement that cannot be exceeded for an executable game sent to the Reset 64 'Craptastic' Game Competition. There was a little doubt, but I succeeded to fit everything I wanted in this part. I am happy this release happened, and I hope you're going to like it. For some time already, I've started to think of creating the full version that could feel & play better and have much more variety. For this though, I released all these little games to test it with audience and see what works and what doesn't. So, feel free to switch the light off and check this out.

This part takes place in the Dead Garden location, and compared to the previous parts, I've shared the map of the location in the docs (see also the screenshot sections here) in order to help the player (you!) of creating sort of mental map of the location. I hope this approach will work better, especially that due to the limited space I wasn't able to differentiate the area too much with different landmarks and checkpoints.

Let's try to answer a question, what can fit in 4 kilobytes? 4 kilobytes of code is 4096 bytes. As Oh no! More bones 4k is purely built in PETSCII characters, it might help to put that number into the perspective (pun intended) as each character represents one byte. On top of that, one more byte per character is needed to define the colour in which that character will be displayed on the screen. All the objects are "scaled" in 4 different distances. "Scaled" as it's all hand drawn process to find the best matching PETSCII character that could represent the smaller version of the object. I actually had to remove the walls in order to fit the dead tree, which was really memory consuming. As it contains a lot of graphic details, all the packers I've benchmarked were obviously unable to reduce program size to a satisfactory level. What remained in the game was the cauldron, and the little evil creatures that were created in the first part of the game with their dead representation once killed. Then, I've added statues that increased the size again. At the end, I still had some space, so I've tried to add the sentinel creatures. They have become a real trouble in this game. Not only because they are impossible to kill, but also because the game exceeded the allowed size! After re-designing them slightly to fit, I actually decided they look better than originally intended.

So, how much of objects data can fit in 4 kilobytes program? In total, all objects you can see in this part of the game, take 2126 bytes. This is 52% of the game! The "rest" is the engine, controls, sounds, the level map and some additional graphics.

So, is it the last part of the series? I hope it is the case, and that the full game will be released as the cartridge release. Hope it's not the last word and more creatures will lurk in these forgotten realms... waiting for you to enter.

You can play the latest part in your web browser or download it from here: https://commocore.itch.io/oh-no-more-bones-4k

Feel free to check the previous two parts: