Duckball on Pico 8

The Game

Duckball is a bullet hell style adventure game for the Pico 8 fantasy console! It was my first attempt at a coding project and I plan to finish a working demo version by Fall of 2026.

Concept

Duckball follows our hero: a young duck with a killer sweatband. Tired of being picked on by the dodgeball bullies at his school and watching his friends get pummeled, he decides to fight back and beat the cheating dodgeball bullies at their own game.

Game Design

Duckball was inspired by shmups and bullet hell shooters such as Enter the Gungeon. The player goes up against the Dodgeball Bullies and defeats them one by one in progressively more difficult levels. More difficult in our case means the bullies resort to all sorts of unregulated methods to get the player “out”. Three outs means a win for the opposing team.

In order to strike the enemy, the player must “catch” a dodgeball by hitting the “throw” button when empty handed. Holding the button charges up the throw attack for a faster and more direct throw. The enemy will have moments where they are vulnerable and the player (and the enemies!) can ricochet balls off of the sides of the map to attempt to hit each other.

Development

Since this is my first major coding project, I’m drawing upon online guides, videos, and manuals to help with understanding Pico 8’s coding language, Lua. I’m also using an ai agent to consult on mechanical aspects of coding and debugging without having the machine actually write the code. The goal is to learn how to build in Lua so I want to make sure that all the code I write is indeed mine.

The sprites are my own design with the consulting help of my partner, Pixel-artist Drip.

Music will also be my design. While I have some basic experience with trackers like the M8 by Dirtywave and a few others, I will also be learning the tracker-style system.

Building in PICO-8

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Mechanics and Feel

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores.

Duckball

I’m going to be updating and uploading Duckball live below so I can show my progress! Thanks for checking it out!