PICO-8

[selmiak]

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.

You can make some funny games with this virtual devkit. Did anybody around here already use this? Show some stuff!

[Danvzare]

I heard about this ages ago, back when I was looking up palettes. It looked interesting.
Although I've never made anything on it, I have messed about with some of the games other people have made with it.

[Pilchard]

I've not tried making anything for PICO-8 yet, but it seems quite accessible and there's a good community around it. Someone's even approximated the SCUMM engine with it!



One of the few PICO-8 games I've tried is Celeste, which is now going to be a fully-fledged game on Nintendo Switch etc., but still with splendid pixel art. You can still play the PICO-8 version here. (Warning: it is a really tough, unforgiving platformer.)

[selmiak]

and Liquidream made a cool scifi game for the Pico-8 using scumm-8 during the AdvJam 2018

watch it, or rather play it, it is very short, link is in the video description
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmEXGqQ0mcM

[Retro Wolf]

There's something about ultra low res pixel art that I love, that spaceship is brilliant!

I've had the PICO-8 site bookmarked for a long time, I think paying for it put me off, not because it's not worth it, but because I don't want to buy something only to not have the time to fully enjoy it, very cool project though.
Lua is quite fun to use, I've had a go with Love2D before, though arrays start at 1 not 0!

[Jojo_the_monkey]

Well spend 5 minutes of play!! The puzzles were not quite challenging, but I liked how it created a story within the 4 screens.

[Retro Wolf]

The guy behind Pico-8 also makes another fantasy console called the Voxatron, which is compatible with Pico-8 in some ways.

An interesting article about the developer.
The developer's twitter feed shows some very cool things that people have done with the software.

An excellent YouTube tutorial series by a German games designer (videos in English), I don't even have the software but these videos are very fun and educational. Because of the way lua is written it wouldn't take that much work to apply the concepts learned and apply them to an AGS project.

If you buy Voxatron you get Pico-8 bundled with it for 20 Dollars.

[teemue]

This is interesting, anyone know more about the learning curve?

[Retro Wolf]

The language is easy, thing is you have to do everything yourself. Want a character to walk across the screen? There's no built in functions like character.walk, you have to create your own. You have to program your own pathfinding and collision, pico-8 is not like an out of the box "kit" like AGS.

What many people may find off putting is Pico-8's self imposed limitations, you have to squeeze all of your graphics onto a 128,128 png. What's impressive about the point and click Liquidream made is that it managed to put in so much content. In this test game I made, I found I had to draw parts of the background in code, draw a green square here, a pink triangle there (this explains Liquidream's differently styled backgrounds). The only sprites are the cursor, the character, the bar sign, and the pizza sign. I haven't tried the pico-8 SCUMM project, wanted to try making it myself.

[imgzoom]https://s8.postimg.cc/uva0gcoyd/test_0.gif[/imgzoom]

Notice how much space I have left for the project, you need to be creative.

[imgzoom]https://s8.postimg.cc/s6amckenp/test.png[/imgzoom]

Yes I bought it, it's fun.
The limited colour palette can be challenging.
You are not going to make a big game with this.
For my own sanity, I do not use the in built sprite editor for big sprites, you can easily export and import the png into your art software of choice.
It can be useful to have the project open in a code editor at the same time, I use Notepad++.

I haven't had a go with that SCUMM-8 project, it seems to be a seperate program where you write in the Python language, which exports a lua file that pico8 understands.

[selmiak]

What many people may find off putting is Pico-8's self imposed limitations, you have to squeeze all of your graphics onto a 128,128 png.

you don't mean you can use only one png for a whole game, do you?

[Cassiebsg]

I think that's exactly what he said.

[Retro Wolf]

Yup! That Maniac Mansion tribute uses a tileset to make the most of the space.
There's a few of these fantasy micro console with varying limitations, not always so harsh as Pico-8.

https://tic.computer/ (I like the look of this one)
https://github.com/incinirate/Riko4
https://pixelvision8.itch.io/game-creator
https://ramilego4game.itch.io/liko12 (shameless rip off of Pico-8 but limitations are not so bad)

What's interesting is they've all settled on Lua, so you could easily switch around once you've got to grips with the language.

[selmiak]

and you can now do 3d modeling on the pico-8, it even has texturing!
[imgzoom]https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvODg0NjIzLzUyNTM1MDAuZ2lm/347x500/Hi5LnO.gif[/imgzoom]

https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad