About Iceberg Trilogy: history, a bad apple and a singular bugfix

Hello, long time no see!

As I remember to actually fix a certain bug that occures with newer PICO-8 versions (more on it later), I decided to write a bit about Iceberg Trilogy (Not Ice Climbers, Eh?, Iceberg Calamity and Iceberg Curse) history and some ups and downs of it.

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It all began back in 2019. I was in one of Pixaria Discord servers, a place I remember fondly to this day, and had a decent experience with my pirated copy of Construct 2 (that’s how I rolled back in the day). One of the mods, Prod, decided on hosting a first (and only) game jam for the server. My first idea was… a puzzle game.

Concept art. Remove everything but the characters and the boards and you get how the prototype looked!

This was definitely beyond my expertise. I only ever made platformers! So it got scrapped right after I finished a buggy match-to-3 code.

After that, few things happened to struck my brain.

I remember playing U-Turn on PICO-8 website before the jam. I liked the concept of going back and forth while avoiding obstacles and racking up high score that way! Even earlier than that I remember one of my undeveloped game ideas - a Christmas game about a snowman on an iceberg… or an ice tower.

Both combined, arcade-like platforming and an iceberg theme, let to a game of Not Ice Climbers, Eh?…

What’s up with the name? Definitely not because they resemble Nintendo’s old NES game Ice Climbers, a resemblance that Prod, the game jam host, managed to notice and suggest the following name. Not at all.

After showing the game to friends, I wanted a way to share the game with other people with ease. Having only one game posted on Gamejolt, I remembered owning an itch.io account for some reason. And once I published the game on there, I fell in love with the platform ever since.

This game is also where a certain someone joins helping with trilogy’s artwork, who I’ll refer to as PK for reasons you’ll see eventually. His initial contribution was making a banner for the itch.io page of the game!

To be honest, even back then I was a bit skeptical of my game. The gameplay is NICE (lol) but the quality was lacking. First thing I did as an attempt to give more content to the game I added an Advanced mode… Seriously, double the events and a spin attack? And only after score 50?! Laaame!

I can’t even get to 50! What was I thinking back then?

Though, that game is an evidence that even back then PICO-8 aesthetic was appealing to me - I imitated the resolution, the sprite sizes, colors! I just really wanted to use that thing! But it will only come to me much later.

Less than a year later, this time purely alone, I made a sequel to it. I wanted to fix what first one had. This project got a name of Iceberg Calamity!

Cleanup mode. Very gimmicky and unusual.

It was even more of a mixed bag than NICE. Sure, quality was a bit better but gameplay got a hit: no more events like in NICE, just very few unlockable modes. It also had somewhat of a GBA resolution because I liked that screen size at the time. Nothing much to say about it.

Iceberg Curse was where things changed.

After getting PICO-8 (twice) and tinkering with it, I began working on a 3rd game. It had everything: much better pixel art, good balancing, neat set of extras and returning features (optional!) and quality of life things. I made sure that, compared to last 2, this was the definitive Iceberg game…

Random screenshot I pulled from itch.io page because I’m too lazy to screenshot anything

It’s alright. I play it occasionally and it’s at least a good time waster for me.

Once again, PK helped with the artwork for banners. He even helped find a musician! All my games before had no music in them so this was perfect!…?

With Iceberg Curse I also messed around with Javascript. With it, it had PCM music that the musician made (turns out I never got an actual track but only a track made with… Music Jam Maker!?), better controls, prettier borders!.. but only for web version. At some point and I decided to get rid of it because it felt… wrong?

What was definitely wrong was the reputation of PK. Even before NICE, PK had an… outstanding behaviour among other server members. He would frequently make sexual jokes and include himself in NSFW environment. In a server for a Kirby and Mario animator, no less. Some time after Iceberg Curse was made, even after trying to defend him and related through his lies, I cut all ties with him. All up to today, I erased all traces of him on my itch.io pages and games. And I still have work for my lazy ass. And I will say it finally: I do not want to associate with PK or his friends anymore. Ever.

…

I think that’s all I can say about the history of the games I made. I might write more about Iceberg Trilogy in the future. I’m already thinking of giving to public some planned features that never got in as well as cool sick trivia but this is too long already so that will have to wait. Maybe I’ll post it on Tumblr? Yes, I have a Tumblr blog, you should take a look at it.

Now, without further ado, the one bug I fixed was…!

• Fixed incorrect palette in newer PICO-8 versions

yep. that’s all.

If you read the whole thing, thank you! I’m not in a good mental environment to make games at the moment but I will try to design more games to make for the future. For now, enjoy the little crumbs I can handle giving away! :D

this was my first time making a long post btw so excuse the everything pls thx