Dear fellow devs!

I fell in love with Picotron and wanted to create a bigger title fit for a release on Steam. That's how "Journey Through The Nightmare Realm II" was born, and it just released on Steam. It would mean the world to me if you could check it out or wishlist it to appeal to the algorithm. Thank you!

Here is what I learned about the process:

Why?

Picotron and PICO-8 are really nice and cozy development environments, creating games and other applications in them feels great. The spirit of helping each other and sharing your games in our community is really important to me and I will never stop doing so. From time to time I create bigger projects that I sell on Steam, which I used to create with Godot, another great engine. Playing around with Picotron has shown me that it is very possible to create bigger (read >2 MB) projects in this engine. So I set out to do just that, and find out the following:

• how do "regular" gamers react to games made in Picotron with it's retro-aesthetic and lack of modern conventions?
• how do Picotron games behave on handhelds like the Steam Deck?
• how is the compatibility with the different platforms?
• can this be a viable alternative to Godot for me personally?

How

For those who have not had a look at the process yet: Everybody can publish a game on Steam, and the past years have had a huge increase of indie games of varying quality - a trade off of Steam's decision to democratize the access to it's platform.
You register with Steamworks and buy an app credit which allows you to create a game on Steam. There is a LOT of setup required: You need store graphics, library graphics, system requirements, at least one trailer, multiple screenshots and at least two weeks of time to wait for Steam to approve your game's store page and game build(separately).

Store Page and library assets

The graphics need to fit very specific requirements, they need to be the correct resolution etc. The description needs to fit your project, the trailer needs to meet certain criteria, the screenshots too. And Steam needs to think so, too. Plan ahead and give yourself enough time for multiple revisions.

Game Build

The same is true for your game build. Depending on whether or not your game is played with a controller you need to fit a different set of requirements. Also keep in mind that "regular" gamers have no idea that our control scheme with X and O exists or where to find those buttons! My title is a local CO-OP title, so it can be played by up to two people with controllers. Steam is very specific about controller support and, at it's current stage, Picotron does not fit all of it's demands. I was NOT able to display my game as supportive of controllers even though it absolutely is, because player two couldn't control the built in pause menu. I started out with controller support, and everything worked out of the box, but Steam's review of my game's build forced me to disable it. This means that players on the Steam Deck need to do some manual setup to make the controller behave as intended. It is fine for players on PC's, though.
You are also expected to display the correct button graphics for different types of controllers, in my case Playstation, Picotron, PC and the Steam Deck. Picotron can not detect the type of controller - I solved this by having different fonts for the different controllers and prompting the players to choose a layout on their first boot, changing the font to the one corresponding with their choice. Xbox controllers do NOT work at the moment, the shoulder buttons do not map to picotron's shoulder buttons. So be careful if you plan to have local or remote play CO-OP!

Platforms

I only support Linux and Windows as I do not own any MacOS devices and I do not intend to battle the lengthy process of making the game behave well on MacOS.

Remote Play together

This is a magical feature of Steam-and I'm glad to report that yes, it does work great! The only times I had trouble with it was when playing cross platform, so a mix of Windows and Linux. But this is an incredibly valuable tool that allows for online play without us having to do any networking. Marvelous!

Expectations

I do not think my game is going to sell particularly well- retro games are a rather small niche, twin stick shooters are even smaller and, let's face it, there are fancier shooters floating around the internet free of charge. But I'm still happy to have gone through the process and I can't wait to see whether future versions might fix some of the issues and allow us to incorporate controllers a little smoother. Steam support is on the roadmap-and I for one am excited to see it.

Special mentions

Picotron executables are tiny! To think that the whole game, all of it's graphics, sfx, music etc fit in just 4MB is crazy to me. One Curator on Steam took note and included it in their collection.

Special thanks

I couldn't have finished the game without the help of these people:

• @abledbody for their magic instrument skills, they created INCREDIBLE sfx and provided a lot of playtesting feedback and an impressive highscore
• @washburnello helped me with artistic feedback, playtesting and they featured a pre-release built of JTNR2 on Twitch
• CatLadyGames for playtesting
• My dear neighbor Alex for playtesting
• @packbat for their wonderful two node instrument collection

Thank you for reading all of this, feel free to ask any questions you might have, I'll try my best to answer them. Have a great day!