Coal Burner 1870/Devlog

Hello and welcome to my first devlog! I will be using these pages to document some parts and obstacles that I have encountered while developing my games. I am writing this a lot later after the fact, so I might not remember everything.

The idea for Coal Burner came to me when 2 things happened. First, I was interested in learning the Godot game engine, and YouTube decided to recommend me this video:

The video raised such a good point! After all, when you start gamedev you are always told to start small. So it makes sense: try PICO-8 so that your scope is forcibly limited and therefore you HAVE to make something small!

The second thing that happened and kickstarted the wheels in my brain to turn was that one of my roommates was also trying out Godot development and decided to attempt a Cookie Clicker clone.

My friend was following a tutorial here and she was showing me some progress. January 2025
Here's her site!

So, it was decided, I was going to also make a Cookie Clicker clone. But about what? Well, inspiration came from an unlikely place.
The younger of you may not know, but Roblox is old. 20 years old if I am not mistaken. So, yes, even though I am now a grown-ass man, I actually did spend a good part of my childhood on Roblox.

Outside of roleplay servers where I pretended to be the breadwinner of a family, I remember I found this one Roblox game where you'd lead a coal tycoon BUT you also get to ride carts along rails to transport the coal. It was so memorable to ~12 year old me that I still remember it to this day, and apparently, the game is still up!

And so, the idea was born: Cookie Clicker, but you burn coal instead.

So, I went into Pico-8 and I started making the layout. No planning no nothing, just keeping in mind that I have a very limiting 128x128 screen. I decided that one half of the screen should be the menu where you purchase resources to automatically burn coal, while the other half is the graphics.

The reason why I dedicated so much of the screen for the coal graphic at first was because I intially planned to have some small graphics in that brown rectangle to represent the resources you have purchased. Like having some furnaces on the left and right and some stickmen moving about to show that things are being done:

A crude mockup of what I initially had in mind.
Decided to scrap this idea early on to keep things simple.

With that being said, the game came along nicely, which says a lot about Pico's strength when it comes to making small projects like this:

Here I have added a small icon and a counter for the amount of resources purchased. And I decided the fire animation should appear randomly on the coal.

Up next I have programmed a small feature where the next resource appears only when you have enough of the previous resource:

You can tell how proud I was of the method I used in a world where people were uncovering shitty programming practices. But oh well, I am still a beginner.

For now I kept having fun, but an obstacle was looming very closely...

I discovered how to access the SUPER SECRET PICO-8 SMALL FONT (just press CTRL+P while in the editor lol) and I also added some baron type of guy to comment on the resources and fully add that "cruel 19th century Victorian Era capitalism" feel.

Another friend helped me rearrange my UI so I can fit in a speech bubble for the baron guy.

Anyway, remember when I told you that PICO-8 has limitations? Well...

THIS IS WHERE THE FUN ENDS

You know how in Cookie Clicker you can have trillions over trillions of cookies? Well, the PICO-8 devs decided to be cruel and add a limit to integer values of 32767. What does that mean? It means that if a value goes over that, it loops around to -32767. Basically, the PICO-8 devs just told me

"Oh, you DUMB MOTHERFUCKER. What's that??? You wanted to store BIG NUMBERS??? for like scores and stuff?? Erm....whoops!!! 32k is the best we can do chief!!!"

Listen, I know that PICO-8 was meant to be lightweight and #soretro!!!! but, in my opinion, this is a step too far and it's only a stupid hinderance.

Look! Even this guy from Lazy Devs is like "yea, you gotta pull off some BS to bypass this if you want to print bigger numbers":

Anyway, at first I took the easiest way that a dev would think about: converting integers into floats. But that didn't do it. So now I was hit with a dilemma: either I use smaller numbers for my game and set a win condition at around 32k coals, or I find a way to bypass this STUPID LIMIT ENFORCED BY SATAN.

As luck would have it, I stumbled upon a solution similar to the one in the video I linked above. Now, every number has to look like this:

Who thought this was a good idea??? Calculations look weird now too:

This is the line that makes sure the price of furnaces increases once you buy a certain resource. It used to be so elegant...now it's...so impure.

Hey guys, maybe next time when we make a fantasy console, we remember that we can afford some liberties of the 21st century...like big integers.
Anyway, around this time, I was visiting family, but I'll be damned if that stopped me from developing. Check out this setup!

It was also around this time when I got started on the music. I would post a video of the process, but I do not have Supporter on Neocities unfortunately :( (nor do I feel like posting it on YouTube.)

It was around this time that the game is more or less finished. I set up a winning condition and made an ending and title screen.

Playtesting time!

The great thing about games like this is that if you have the core gameplay ready, what remains mostly is balancing. Aaaaand I have been keeping up with it mostly during development, thanks to my roommates. Some friends let me know that I still had to do some balancing but oh well.

So, this is what I can remember from the development of Coal Miner 1870. A small game where I wanted to give Pico a shot as I make the jump into gamedev. It was a mostly pleasant experience! Outside of the int limit that pissed me off, I wholeheartedly still recommend Pico for beginners who want to try out gamedev so they can pump out quick small games and learn a workflow and learn what game development entails.