Log In  

Can anyone suggest some resources for a rank newcomer to game coding? I've got enough understanding from playing with c++ in college to understand most of the syntax when I read Pico-8 carts, but it's tough for me to understand what's going in in the more complex parts of the carts. Even jelpi is over my head.

I was hoping I'd learn how to do some basic game mechanics like collision detection, but I'm just going in circles here!

P#12531 2015-08-10 00:46 ( Edited 2015-08-11 06:25)

to be honest, coding is pretty rough to start and PICO-8 can be a bit like jumping into the deep end! im working on an intro coding tutorial right now and you should check out the 'zine that comes out soon, I wrote a tutorial on how to made a particle effects engine that should be of help

P#12532 2015-08-10 00:54 ( Edited 2015-08-10 04:54)

I'm looking forward to reading that zine! In some ways, Pico-8 seems like a good place to start (I got a sprite moving around with acceleration and friction in just a couple of hours!) but at the same time it's not a system that's well documented. I looked at a couple of Lua books, but it seems that would be overkill with P8 having a small subset of that language.

P#12533 2015-08-10 01:00 ( Edited 2015-08-10 05:01)

i think pico8 is a perfect place to learn to code.

collision detection is a tricky subject though and there are so many different methods.

comparing if two rectangles overlap is a good start

function are_rectangles_overlapping(r1,r2)
return r1.x1 < r2.x2 and r1.x2 > r2.x1 and
r1.y1 < r2.y2 and r1.y2 > r2.y1
end

and once you've detected a collision, you need to figure out how to respond, which is even more troublesome =)

P#12538 2015-08-10 02:37 ( Edited 2015-08-10 06:37)

Thanks for the comments @lmpbox, your carts are among my favorites! I spent the better part of an hour playing Tempest tonight.

P#12542 2015-08-10 05:10 ( Edited 2015-08-10 09:11)

you're welcome! oh wow! thanks! haha I didn't think there was quite that much gameplay in it yet =)

look forward to seeing what you come up with, feel free to ask in IRC if you need any help.

P#12544 2015-08-10 05:14 ( Edited 2015-08-10 09:14)

The fanzine is going very well!
I plan to release probably 2 of them, one next week, the other at the end of the month.

I would like to start a special " Pico-8 programming from scratch"
fanzine. @bitmOO is also interested to ne part of it.

Would you like to write to basic "how to learn lua for pico-8" tutorial ? Especially focus on people who don't know nothing about programming? ( adult and children) ?

P#12546 2015-08-10 05:45 ( Edited 2015-08-10 09:45)

Here's the official documentation on Lua (the programming language PICO-8 uses): http://www.lua.org/docs.html

P#12554 2015-08-10 10:15 ( Edited 2015-08-10 14:15)

@IvoahThanks ! My idea it's to make something more friendly to people who don't have any previous knowledge in programming, for real newbie.

P#12559 2015-08-10 10:43 ( Edited 2015-08-10 14:43)

Honestly Lua is pretty easy to understand. I think what would be most helpful are tutorials on common tasks specific to coding games. This YouTube video is a good example.

He shows how to draw a sprite, move it around with the buttons, and animate it. (It's a little rough because he didn't know he could just save a blank cart in P8 to get the headers, and he does his editing in vim and doesn't explain why, which is a little distracting for a newbie)

P#12561 2015-08-10 14:24 ( Edited 2015-08-10 18:29)

@ victorsmonster I'm agree with you, tutorial on common talk are probably the best to learn.

P#12562 2015-08-10 15:12 ( Edited 2015-08-10 19:12)

If you have some time and C++/C skills you might get a lot out of the Handmade Hero stream where the streamer is coding a game from scratch in C with very minimal use of libraries.

Obviously a lot of it is down in the nitty gritty. But for example here's a playlist of just the episodes dealing with collision detection that might be more useful for a pico-8 programmer.

P#12565 2015-08-10 20:01 ( Edited 2015-08-11 00:01)

@cheepicus, exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!

P#12570 2015-08-11 02:25 ( Edited 2015-08-11 06:25)

[Please log in to post a comment]

Follow Lexaloffle:          
Generated 2024-03-28 20:58:36 | 0.103s | Q:30