Hi y'all!

I recently put together a little narrative game in pico-8, but am getting feedback that for some folks, the in-game font just isn't legible, which makes it kind of unplayable for them. Oh no! Now I'm looking into transcript options to help make things more accessible. The easiest thing would be to include a text file of everything in the game, but that feels a little impractical. I'm hoping I can go for something a little more dynamic, since this is a game after all!

My thought was that it might be possible to edit the HTML file that goes alongside the cartridge for publishing games. This hypothetical edit would make it so that players have the option to display the on-screen text in a more accessible font below the main game. It seems great in theory, but I'm not sure how possible it actually is. I know that smaller edits like frame colors are possible, but this would require communication between the game and the HTML file, which seems tricky, especially given the translation between the two coding languages. It seems a bit too aspirational from where I'm standing from.

Still, this would be an ideal setup for players who need a different font to play the game, so I'm coming to you all to ask for thoughts. Does this seem possible? Would it require a lot of extra coding? Has it already been done? Any input is helpful input!

Thank you :)

It's definitely possible; you could send serialized text out through the GPIO "pins" (see the GPIO section of the manual) and then read that from javascript running on the page.

Someone even did something sort of similar a while back; they made a PICO-8 cart which displays tweets from Twitter :D

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3909

Ooh, very relevant. I'll see what I can do working off of what they talk about here. Thanks so much!