Nebulus

Down on the planet Nebulus all is not well. Someone or something has been building giant towers in the sea and they didn't even apply for planning permission. 

In the offices of Destructo Inc. you awake from your afternoon nap with the phone almost erupting on your desk. The boss is shouting about some little destruction job he's got for you. Still half asleep talking about the brand new Mk.7 Mini-Sub he's got for you and the words "pay rise" you're out of your office in a flash, leaving the phone dangling out of the window as the boss goes on to talk about the extreme danger involved... 

CONTROLS

On the title screen left/right arrows select the starting level from 1 to the furthest tower you've previously reached.

PLAYING THE GAME

You arrive at the bottom of each tower in your trusty submarine. Climb to the top of the tower within the allowed time. The towers are covered with various ledges, tunnels and lifts. You may also discover ledges which dissolve when you stand on them and slippery ledges which will push you left or right. 

Flashing blocks and bouncing balls can be destroyed by shooting them but the silver rolling balls can only be stopped in their tracks for a few seconds. All other creatures are indestructible. If hit by a creature, you will tumble off the ledge and land a few levels down. If you fall in the sea, you lose a life. 

Entering the final door at the top of the tower sets off the destruction sequence. You are awarded bonuses for the time left and for technique and the tower will crumble into the sea. 

When a tower has been destroyed you get back in your submarine and travel underwater to the next tower. During this time you can pick up bonuses by catching fish. This is achieved by shooting air bubbles to capture the fish, which can then be collected.

CREDITS

Nebulus was originally created by John M Phillips (@JohnMPhillips6) in 1987 for the C64. He did the design, graphics, music/sfx and code, as well as going on to make the ZX Spectrum, Amiga and Atari ST versions! The Amstrad CPC version was created by Chris Wood (graphics and code) and Dave Rogers (music/sfx and sound driver). The original cassette inlay art was created by Steve Weston. Nebulus was published by Hewson.

This fan-remake for the PICO-8 fantasy console borrows heavily from the above creator's work. Please support the current copyright holders by checking out the originals on Antstream Arcade (see the story behind Nebulus), or on THEC64. 

The PICO-8 version was made possible by:

• @zep for pico-8.
• PX9 contributors including @zep, @felice, @p01, @icegoat and @catatafish. Nebulus uses PX9 prediction combined with arithmetic coding compression inspired by Matt Mahoney's fpaq1.
• @sebt3 for scale2x image scaling used in tower backgrounds at build time for smoother scaling.
• @emu for inspiring the bubble transition effect.
• @Amysaurus121 for inspiring the menu screen wave effect.
• @Mattias_G made the awesome CRT effect.
• @samhocevar for z8lua, used to script the build process.
• @phammond for good-enough-minifier.
• @janhalt3 for the tail-call function chaining idea.
• @freds72 for testing and feedback.
• The entire PICO-8 community for their continuing inspiration and support.

TECH

PICO-8 Nebulus runs at 60fps in the console's undocumented hi-res and hi-color mode: 128x256 resolution with the full 32 color palette. It fits into a single cart (17152 15616 bytes data lua). The web version optionally applies a CRT filter for those eighties feels.

Here are snapshots of the PICO-8 Nebulus source lua code.

Here is a writeup on Picoscript, a custom script system used to save tokens in Nebulus.

STANDALONE CARTRIDGE

If you own the PICO-8 devkit you can download and play the standalone cart nebulus.p8.png.

Since Nebulus runs in hi-res mode you will need to launch PICO-8 with the hi-res command line parameters:

pico8.exe -displays_x 2 -displays_y 2

Then once inside the PICO-8 console:

run"nebulus"