Publishing my first game using PICO-8

[montroser]

PICO-8 is a wonderful little thing. Kind of like a modern day Commodore 64 with a brilliantly intuitive IDE. My fourth grader has spent many a weekend tinkering with sound effects and sprites and animations and all the like. The whole space is nicely constrained (128x128px 4-bit color) while still being expressive enough to capture the imagination...

[MattPalmer1086]

Yep. although my son isn't really into coding, PICO-8 was the only thing we tried where we actually made a mostly functional platform game.

He got really into defining the sprites, levels and sounds, and that took him into coding movement and enemies and different bullets for the character.

[Dylan16807]

> The whole space is nicely constrained (128x128px 4-bit color) while still being expressive enough to capture the imagination...

It's pretty cool but I get overly annoyed that it has strict source code limits.

Hopefully the token limit is what dominates coding most of the time, since it's significantly more realistic.

[jncfhnb]

> So can confirm basic sounds effects add a LOT to the experience. A lot more than I was expecting.

Good insight. Some folks trip over themselves to say “you gotta prototype something to see if it’s fun” but the reality is that a lot of stuff is not fun without the juicy bits

[Scalene2]

with some notable exceptions, a game that is not fun without sound is like a comedy that isn't funny without a laugh track.

[tmountain]

Game looks fun, I will give it a try. If anyone wants to try writing PICO-8 games in TypeScript instead of Lua, I made a project to make it easy to get started.

https://github.com/tmountain/pico-8-typescript

Nothing against Lua, but it might be uncharted territory for some people.

[tooltower]

Does anyone know of an open-source version of PICO-8? I don't even care about any of the features, as long as there's an active community around the project.

[re]

TIC-80 is a (somewhat similar) fantasy console that is open-source. https://tic80.com/

[katspaugh]

You should checkout WASM4⁽¹⁾, an Open Source WebAssembly-based fantasy console with 4 colors and a 160x160 screen.

One of its advantages over TIC-80 is that you can program games in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. The games are tiny pure Wasm "carts" that can run on any Wasm runtime, from the browser to Nintendo 3DS.

[1] https://wasm4.org

[buitreVirtual]

An alternative open source fantasy console is TIC 80: https://tic80.com

[zx90]

To all the sibling repliers: PICO-8, TIC-80, Load81 and probably others are somewhat Lua oriented. What is it about Lua that makes it so popular in this area?

[0-_-0]

There is the Nim-based Nico:

https://github.com/ftsf/nico

[TedDallas]

Tic-80 is what you are looking for.

[helpfulContrib]

LOAD81 could probably use some eyeballs:

https://github.com/antirez/load81.git

[felideon]

Very nice! Would love to find time to build a PICO-8 game some day. I’m a bit confused as to whether it took the OP 3 years or about a week to build the game, though:

> September 18th 20203 - I think im actually going to commit...

[codezero]

According to Twitter it was a week. https://x.com/boyter/status/1704999509183668656?s=46

[MattPalmer1086]

Its actually really easy to get into. I managed to make an asteroids like game in only a few hours.

[frenchie14]

PICO-8 is really fun! I've released two games with it and I'm working on my third. For the third one I'm trying to push the edge of what the limitations permit, which adds quite a bit of complexity to an otherwise straightforward engine. You are only allowed a certain amount of tokens (~2k lines of code), characters, and compressed cart space. Maximizing the use of these limits requires a lot of tricks!

[cableshaft]

Nice!

One of these weekends I need to just sit down and finish my Pico-8 game. The gameplay is working fully (minus a couple nice to haves I wanted to add), I was just stuck on menu and logo design and sound/music when I drifted off.

It's a pretty nice system and fun to play with. I recommend it.

[oystermax]

It is a pretty fun game! It is also encouraging to read your sharing. Have been a game player since my childhood. Thinking about create my own games but haven't completed one yet, sinceI found it a bit overwhelming to architect all resources into a game. Creating the first game with constrains would help a lot to start. BTW really love pixel games!

[noman-land]

This game is super fun! I've never really gotten into one of these games before but this one sucked me in. Made me want to get a handheld or something :).

How do the different opponents work? Are they using some sort of known strategies? Seems like they would follow a pattern and once you figured it out you could defeat them. How far does it go?

[Tao3300]

9 levels. Most of them have a simple pattern like "attack, shield, repeat with same attack" but some are more complex.

[danparsonson]

Wonderful little game, congratulations on the release :-)

[jcmontx]

I played like 12 levels! Super fun. I can beat almost every wizard using lightning + acid combo

[two_handfuls]

Nice game!