Hi people,

I have PICO-8 around about several years now, but never published any game on it.

This year I have a concept of minimalistic choice-based adventure. and I wonder if Pico-8 requisites are capable of moving what I have in mind.

What I wonder is how many full-screen, full-color illustrations are capable Pico-8 of storing, before consuming the whole memory, or starting using any multi-cartridge solution.

Also, each illustration will have a minimal 2 frame animation on them. That could be done with sprites, but yeah, the concept is how many locations like this can I store.

Thanks!

within a single cart? say, 6-10 would be already good (possibly a bit more using symetry or non-changing tiles).

look at:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=34058
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=49901
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=38692

That depends on how many colors you choose to use on each of them, how good you are with compression algorithms and how much other data you need alongside the illustrations. The links freds72 posted are good options if you need help with compression.

Here's some raw numbers to consider: If you don't need a map, sprites or music, then the cart memory gives you 0x4300 bytes in hexidecimal addresses, which is 17,152 in decimal. On top of that, the code can contain 65,536 bytes of text, which then needs to be compressed to within 16,386 bytes using the built-in compression. The built-in algorithm is pretty good, though the algorithms in the links still can get you more compression.

I just tried out a cropped version of that image (because the screen is only 128x128) on the tool I've been using for my current project and I only got about %50 compression, which came out to 8301 characters represented in hexidecimal or 4152 if converted to raw bytes. That then resulted in %19 of the compressed capacity when copy-pasted into an empty cartridge.

Based on that, I think I could fit around 7, including the simple animations, without even adjusting the algorithm to fit your game.

Other than that, I think an even more optimal line-based solution might also be possible given how many stretches of the same color that image has. I don't know if anyone's posted a good tool for automating that though.

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful answers.

In that case, I feel that that's not enough for the scope I am thinking, maybe I would need around 20, but this information is very useful, and perhaps an even more minimalistic point-and-click approach could work.

Thanks!

see: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=43659 for something like a graphical adventure