Pico³ is a game I made with Aliceffekt (as Les Collégiennes) over the course of a month, and that we presented at the Prince of Arcade party on November 9th.
Download
Pico³ – Windows Version [6.3 Mb]
Pico³ – Mac OS X Version [11.6 Mb] (Nov. 15th Edit : Fixed the mac build, it runs now!)
Aliceffekt designed the game mechanics, levels and visuals, while I took care of all programming and procedural animations.
How to play
The game is fairly simple on the surface :
- Emitters emit cells of a primary color (red, green or blue).
- Receptors expect cells of a certain color, or color (ordered) sequence.
- You can place Projectors that redirect cells or combine them, if different cells hit the projector simultaneously.
The challenge is to combine colors at the right time, with the given resources and world layout. It becomes an intricate resource management/puzzle game, and even the simplest-looking puzzle can prove almost impossible!
There is only 13 levels in this version, which was made for a party setting. The difficulty curve proved to be very harsh for new players, and even seasoned players (like me) can’t reach the end. It’s a hard game — Aliceffekt’s trademark game design. ^_^
It is played with mouse+keyboard on all platforms, but also supports the Xbox 360 gamepad (either wired or wireless with an USB receiver) on Windows by using Rémi Gillig’s XInput.NET for Unity. I made my own wrapper over it to detect press/hold/down, actually the code was ripped out of my XNA code. That’s the fun part of using C# scripting, I can just share code between projects even if it’s not the same technology!
Controls
If you’re too lazy to read the tutorials :
- Right click and drag to rotate the camera round the world, scrollwheel to zoom in/out
- Left click to create a Projector, and left click on a face to select its direction
- Z to undo the last Projector (or hover any Projector and hit Z to undo that one)
- R to restart the level
- Escape to return to the first Level
- ALT+F4 or Command+Q to quit
Hope you like it, it was a a lot of fun to make and I’m already looking forward to my next Unity creation… It’s a great work environment.
pretty cool !! thanks dude I wıll keep eyes on thıs websıte
Great game, Beat it in around 45 minutes though, would have loved to play more! Only problem is that I found a pretty simple trick I call storing, I just place two reflectors facing each other to hold a color in place, that way I get each color one at a time and then release them when I need them. It felt like cheating though so I finished it with out that trick, without storing the game proved to be a true challenge, lovely design and really nice aesthetics, the terrain (I think it was..) underneath in the background looked really great!
Massive fan of yours by the way, I love the quality of your games and the speed with which you make them, (That was both in literal reference to your jam games and a joke reference to Fez (sorry had to)) Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, good luck in any future endeavours!
Nice! I don’t believe exploiting mechanics counts as cheating, you were just more clever than us :D
Thanks for the kind words :)
Well it’s such a fun game, anything that hinders that is wrong whether defined as cheating or not! Perhaps exploit is a better word, technically fine, but frowned upon, and ultimately destructive to the experience.
Dear Renaud
as a journalist of Germanys most successful monthly PC-magazine CHIP I am currently researching content for the enclosed CHIP100 DVD which contains 100 highlights on one chosen topic. Issue 09/2012 (date of publication: 3rd of August 2012) is all about “Fantasy and Science Fiction”.
I would like to offer our readers your free games “pico battler”, “The Clous is a lie” and “pax Britannica” (if possible although including upcoming versions) and distribute it as an additional service on any future CD/DVD, ISO-download and via CHIP-App-Tablet edition. Therefore I would be highly grateful if you would give me your approval. Of course we will credit you and your web presence as the owner of rights.
Feel free to contact me if you have further questions.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Karsten Bunz
Hi, thanks for your interest! The games are free to download and redistribute, as long as they’re properly credited.
Pico Battle, Pico3 and The Cloud Is A Lie was made by Les Collégiennes, which is me (Renaud Bédard) and Devine Lu Linvega.
Pax Britannica was made by No Fun Games, which is me, Henk Boom and Matthew Gallant.
Thanks for your quick reply and we will respect the credits the way you mentioned them.
Best Wishes from Munich
Karsten