The Game of Errors (Pico-8)

The Game of Errors is a project based on Gianni Rodari's Libro degli errori ("Book of Errors"). Much like in Rodari's tales, the game shows a world gone out of joint due to language mishaps. Players will play a small cat trying to set things straight!

CONTROLS

Movement & Interaction

Use the arrow keys ↑ ↓ → ← to move the character around the screen.

To interact with something (talk to NPCs, pick up objects, open doors...) use X. X is also used to advance through dialogue.

To cycle through your inventory, press Z . If you want to try using an item in your inventory on an NPC, select it and talk to them. Something will happen if the match is right!

Menu

In the last part of the game, you will have to select options from a menu. When the menu is open, you can pick an element from it using the arrow keys ↑ ↓ and pick the element by pressing Z .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Made in Pico-8, so thanks Lexaloffle for creating this wonderful fantasy console.

I am very grateful to Lorenzo Eterno for providing detailed and challenging reflections and suggestions for the game when I produced the first version of it in Bitsy (can be played here — in Italian). Gianluca Pedrotti also gave me very useful feedback on this first draft, which proved very useful while I was putting together the Pico-8 version.

Many thanks to the wonderful Pico-8 community, too. I would not have been able to learn how to use Pico-8 and pull off some pretty tricky stuff without the help of tutorials, explainers and cartridges that these samaritans put together and made available free-of-charge.

I am particularly grateful to Space Cat's tutorials (on their YouTube channel) from which I got a good 80% of my Pico-8 knowledge. The inventory system or the pop-up menu from the last part of the game are examples of things I learned how to do in their videos. Give their channel (and their Pico-8 course) a check.

Thanks to profpatonildo for creating a text box example that I integrated into my project in order to pull off dialogue.

And shoutout to Mboffin (Dylan Bennett) for their cartridge on screen transitions whose code I also adapted and used to move from screen to screen in my game.