Cave of the Crown

Fight off waves of enemies and gain an upgrade after each wave.

I made this in about a month and was very inspired by the combat of Hollow Knight (this is essentially my version of the Colosseum of Fools from it).

Controls + Instructions

Controller works too, O and X are just some of the main 4 buttons.

move	⬅️/➡️
jump	Z
slash	X
heal	hold ⬇️
ability	tap Z+X at same time

You can hold the up/down arrow keys while slashing to direct it up or down, this can be done in mid air and you can bounce of enemies head if you slash down on their heads (aka, pogoing).

Slashing at a projectile will reflect them (use this to damage the flying shooters).

Each time you hit an enemy you get energy, which appears in the orb on the bottom left. You can use this to heal or use an ability. Healing and some abilities take 1/3 of your energy orb, some abilities take half of that amount, 1/6.

Development

This is the first time I really pushed the limits of Pico-8, I exceeded sprite sheet capacity and stored it as strings in the code. I also ran against the token limit quite a bit. Both the token limit and compressed capacity warnings were blinking quite a bit at the end 🫠

I used up all the sfx tracks, mostly for music which I had a lotta fun making, I actually got carried away and made most of it before half the game was done :)

I would've liked to make the final boss a more interesting fight, to have a proper tutorial instead of text on the menu and the description, include another enemy, etc, but alas, tokens were sparse.

The Very Little Bit of Lore

You see, they say the crown has great power. So using that power the queen has possessed/controlled the enemies from her domain at the bottom of the cave, that's why they have green eyes. Or was it really the queen..? 

The boss fight characters are (in order): The Lost Monarch, The Royal Knight, and The Crowned Queen

Have fun! Its pretty tough, so good luck!

game by @Munchkin
playtesting from @DianteClark

lexaloffle page: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=150629#p