I'm new to the BBS and new to Pico-8 as well. I've been obsessed with the concept since I first became aware of it around four months ago. Everything about it fires every happy neuron in my autistic brain and I now own four different handheld emulators which I use almost exclusively for playing Pico-8 games.

I cut my teeth on coding back in the 80s when I was in high school, but trying to write games in BASIC was a disappointment and the only other viable option at the time was learning machine language coding, which terrified me. If Pico-8 had existed back then, my mind would have been blown, and my life would have ended up very differently.

I'm finally sitting down and going through the "Shmup for Pico-8" tutorial from the very beginning. I really like the fact that each installment has a homework assignment. I want to be able to take an idea for a game and be able to say with confidence, "Yeah, I think I can make this happen."