I always liked tunnel effects and I wanted to see if I could make one in PICO-8 with a simple method of drawing circles. I think it turned out pretty well. There is the issue of gaps between circles, but this does allow you to see parts of the tunnel further in the distance which I find interesting. I also gained a bit of intuition about shaping behavior with sin/cos and square root functions.
I also decided to try out the music capabilities of PICO-8 for the first time. I was mostly inspired by a track from the game No Time to Explain. I don't remember which one, I have just had parts of the melody floating around in my head for years.
A representation of times tables drawn on a circle, animating through the progression of times tables starting at 2. The structures that exist intrinsically within the generated images are hypnotic.
Here is a youtube video that explains in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhbuKbxJsk8
I wrote a c++ version awhile ago you can see here: https://github.com/bitwitch/times-tables