Version 2.0
Made some changes to make this thing a bit cooler:
Version 1.0
Started messing with pico8 yesterday, and it's enough fun that I've already made three stupid doodads.
This one is, uh, sort of a game. You can win, but it's really just a clickbaity skinner box where you watch a culturally-exploitative cloth sim in various states of disrepair.
The rarest message is "GET OUT OF AMERICA." You have to mess up really bad to get it. I've literally never seen it happen, but I know that it's possible. You have to pass fewer than 40% of the line-spawn-checks (each line has a random chance to either spawn or not-spawn), but the lowest line-spawn-probability you can get for any given flag is 60%. Because of this, getting a sub-40% score is extremely rare. Maybe somebody can figure out just how rare it is.
Didn't upload the first two doodads because they weren't interactive - but here's a gif of each of them instead:
Ocean sunrise:
https://twitter.com/2DArray/status/789699736433401856
Rainy day:
https://twitter.com/2DArray/status/789940695469400064
Overhauled the cloth sim so it operates in 3D now. It's projected orthographically ("just uh, ignore the z value for rendering," in this case), so there's no parallax - but even so, allowing points to move on the z-axis produces much more believable motion. I'm leaving the old version up for comparison. Particularly, the mostly-intact flags don't hold themselves upright like a rectangle made of jello anymore.
Added basic "quad rendering." It draws two extra pixel-lines to connect pairs of simulation-lines. Makes it seem like the simulation is much higher-density than it actually is - score! (The cloth sim uses 7 rows with 10 particles each). For style, some of the simulation lines are now invisible (like the horizontal lines along unbroken stripe segments, and all the non-star diagonal structure lines)