Night City was released in full on Sunday night, May 17th. Constraint drove the completion of the project but it also drives the theme itself, an invisible hostile force applying pressure, until you are crushed into oblivion, or you face that force head on and blast it to pieces.

We're about 3 days in and we have 17 views and 6 plays. Most of those plays are friends and family.

I'm calling this a post-release rather than a postmortem, as the game didn't die at launch, it finally exists.

Here's how the constraint produced the menace. The game started as a simple proof of concept: can a monochrome game have sufficient detail to create a specific atmosphere?

For workflow this project began on PICO-8, drawing simple character sprites and wiring them up to move around the screen.

Influences

Visuals & Sound

Dark City (1998) is a heavy influence here. It's got a noir feel, with supernatural/sci-fi elements that create a sense of unease and wonder. What is going on here? Why is the world this way?

Another heavy influence is John Carpenter. He's sometimes credited as the master of B cinema. Aside from the nostalgia, there's a technical accomplishment that draws me into his work. He appears to achieve a lot within a restricted budget, often through atmosphere and a shameless unapologetic "here's what you get" delivery of the effects. If you listen carefully to the soundtrack in Night City you may notice that it's in the same key as the original Halloween theme.

PICO-8's constraints are a proxy for Carpenter's constrained working style — I can't say if this is factual or not but the idea gives me motivation to deliver something ambitious in a severely constrained environment.

Gameplay Design & Iteration

The concept evolved with the visuals. A ghost was easy to draw in the 8x8 sprite box, and it looked a lot like the ghosts from Pacman. From there came the idea to flip it — you play as the ghost and fight Pacman at the end. This led to the moon transforming from just an atmospheric background element to the final boss of the game.

Gameplay followed the visuals too. Parallax scrolling came in early with the monochrome art, and autoscroll followed as a natural way to keep things moving. The buildings were already set up as platforms, so that worked.

Tying it together was the next problem. A scrolling/platformer/runner with a moon to fight at the end — what connects them? PICO-8 is well-suited to shmup style/bullet hell boss fights, so the final boss was going to be that. But how does the running and platforming matter? That's when pickups were added to the game and the cycle became clearer — run the platform, pick up pellets from the rooftops, then use them as ammo for the final fight.

From there hazards were added (antennae, steam vents, wind, cars) so the player would have something to dodge while collecting the pellets. In one of the earlier drafts there was also a long tutorial to open the game, explaining how to duck under antennae, jump over steam, avoid cars, and so on. It ate up a lot of token space in PICO-8 and it was boring, so it didn't make the final cut.

Test playthroughs with the hazards in place were functional but not fun, and not menacing. The game needed something more threatening to interact with. That's when enemies were introduced.

After tuning enemies and level progression, the game felt like it had the right level of difficulty. Unfortunately I was the only tester, so the difficulty barometer may be off.

Trade Offs

PICO-8 is heavily constrained. This forces game devs to assess features and cut details. It also lets them finish projects. Outside of a weekend last year developing the concept art, the rest came together in another 3 day period. That's 5 days total for a finished mini game, which is one of the strengths of PICO-8.

The tutorial got cut, as noted. It was a pre-level 1 level where you played through and the hazards appeared on screen with explanations of how to interact. Cut for being boring, and to make room for the final boss death animation, SFX, and music code. After some feedback from a friend, I may need to update this to include a description of how to interact with the hazards, so players have a chance to understand the rules rather than face overly punishing gameplay.

There are four unique songs in the game: opening credits, gameplay, death, victory. A unique boss fight song was planned but got shelved in the interest of shipping. Revision/feature addition hell has stalled progress on larger projects, so this one shipped "good enough" on purpose.

Future Aspirations

The hope, as with every game release, is that more people play the next one. Building a following is part of that, and writing this is part of building it.

For the game itself, the goal is to make it fun and to figure out how to deliver something unique with a specific style while still being interesting/fun for the player.

I plan to keep exploring urban environments and invisible hostility. Menacing atmosphere, without going full horror.