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Cart #33223 | 2016-12-09 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

This is my first PICO-8 game.

I am a high school teacher, and I'm involved in our "e-Learning" program. I thought PICO-8 would be an interesting way to introduce students to coding.

So this game is something of a "proof of concept" to show that with very limited experience (I'm not an IT teacher and have no formal IT training) you can quickly put together a working game. We're running a "Mission to Mars" inquiry learning project for our Year 9 classes next year, so that gave me the theme.

I wanted to include:
— a title screen
— movement
— animation
— a scoring system
— sound effects
— music

The code is extremely ugly, because I was just trying to make it work as quickly as possible. It's a mess, to be honest. There is a lot going on in _draw that should be in _update, for starters.

This was three evenings, learning everything from scratch. I'm pretty pleased with it, although it's not a game that will hold your attention for long! But it should be enough for me to show my school that PICO-8 is something we should encourage our students to play with.

(I owe a debt to Drop Down, which I used to work out how to create game states, and the basic falling/gravity mechanic.)

P#33224 2016-12-09 04:15 ( Edited 2016-12-09 21:12)

That's really cool - congrats on your first "release" :)

One of the ideas I had a few years ago to teach programming was to create a basic testbed project - something like space invaders and then remove all the code for main gameplay functions (like movement, ai, collision detection etc) and replace them with empty stubs so that the game run's but doesn't do anything.

That way the students can write code and see an immediate effect (oh look - the aliens are moving) without having to worry about the mechanics of setting up a game, dealing with input and a render loop etc.

P#33234 2016-12-09 07:40 ( Edited 2016-12-09 12:40)

Oh, that's a great idea! I think I will use that. :-)

P#33253 2016-12-09 14:45 ( Edited 2016-12-09 19:45)

Lol. I was begining to think it was impossible to land one. Got it finally.

P#33256 2016-12-09 16:12 ( Edited 2016-12-09 21:12)

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