MegaMap

This is a method for creating massive explorable maps in pico-8. The current demo is very much unfinished, but the under-the-hood mechanics are fully functional. The resulting map is 65536 pixels wide and 16384 pixels tall. Finishing this demo is just a matter of drawing a 65 thousand pixel wide map and then adding a better character controller.

The method used to achieve this incredible scale is fractal-like recursion. The world is made of 8x8 tiles, of which there are different types. Those tile types are used to draw 8x8 chunks, which can be stored compactly in the sprite sheet. In turn, those chunks can be used to draw 8x8 megachunks, which again are stored in the sprite sheet. Therefore, each megachunk is 512 pixels wide, but only needs to reference a few other sprites in order to be drawn on screen. These megachunks are used in the map editor to make the final world map, which is 128 wide and 32 tall.

The restrictions of this method are:

• You can only use 16 tile types at most. Each tile type has transition borders, and you can choose where those borders appear.
• Same for chunk types, 16 at most plus the transition borders.
• The rest of the sprite sheet (a bit over 100 sprites, depending on how many tile and chunk types you used) can be used to draw megachunks. Adding more sprites (e.g. for characters and ui) will cut into that number.

I uploaded the raw pico-8 cartridge for the jam, so you will need pico-8 in order to run it. This also allows you to see my horrible code (good luck). I plan to finish a basic map and upload a web playable version of this demo after the jam. I'll also make a video about this on my YouTube channel, Dev Quest (eventually).