So I recently discovered Pico-8 and think it's great. I'm a hobbyist programmer at best but playing with Pico-8 has taken me back to my teen years messing about with basic and assembly on my C64 and Atari ST. I never managed to pull together a full game back then, and pretty much put any programming aspirations on hold for a long time except for the odd macro in excel.
Anyhoo... (deep breath) .. here's my first attempt at a Pico-8 game, very loosely inspired by the initial stagestate of a certain C64 game I was rather fond of.
Background: After returning colour to the world our hero retired to a peaceful house in the country. But... oh no!.. his lovely garden is under attack, and there's not a power-up in sight - so it's no lasers, just bouncing (and the cats gone missing!).
Gameplay: protect the flowers by bouncing into the nasties.
LeftRight to accelerate the ball in that direction (ie decelerate if travelling in the opposite direction)
There are four types of nasty:
Bugs - Nasty little beasts that eat the flowers. Dropped by birds.Harmless to the ball - just bash em! Different waves have more or less bugs. They flash on the radar when eating a flower... kill em quick.
Birds - fly about and have a chance of dropping a bug. Easy to kill, can't harm the ball.
Spikey birds (aka killer birds) - have swords for wings. Will hurt the ball if hit from above... so hit them from below. Also drop bugs.
Frogs (aka cyber frogs) - jump about on their powerful cyber-scissor back legs. Will hurt the ball if hit from below. Have a chance of 'snipping' and killing any flower they are landed on so try to splat them before they jump...
Lose points for dead flowers, score points for every nasty that's killed.
There are six waves which repeat over three levels. Extra life at level start.
Game over if all flowers are eaten or all lives lost.

I'm not sure how fun it is, now it's all done and dusted. Also not sure if too hard or too easy, so any