I'm starting a tutorial on how to make your a Shmup in Pico-8 from scratch! It's for complete beginners.

The goal is to make a basic Shmup first and then slowly turn it into an AWESOME shmup!

New episodes on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I will use this thread to keep a list of the episodes and post significant progress. Let's gooooo!

Episode 2 - Moving Stuff
Episode 3 - Controls
Episode 4 - Shooting
Episode 5 - Animation
Episode 6 - Health UI
Episode 7 - Starfield
Episode 8 - Animating Stars
Episode 9 - Game Over
Episode 10 - More Bullets
Episode 11 - Enemies
Episode 12 - Collsions
Episode 13 - Invulnerability
Episode 14 - Explosions
Episode 15 - Better Explosions
Episode 16 - Shockwaves
Episode 17 - Music
Episode 18 - More Enemies
Episode 19 - Big Enemies
Episode 20 - Enemy Spawns
Episode 21 - Enemy Movement
Episode 22 - Enemy Attacks
Episode 23 - Enemy Bullets
Episode 24 - Spread Shots
Episode 25 - Aimed Shots
Episode 26 - Pickups
Episode 27 - Bombs
Episode 28 - Boss
Episode 29 - The End

Also annoucing the Lazy Devs Basic Shmup Showcase. If you participated in the tutorial you have one month to finish your game and submit it to the showcase. I pledge to play all of the submitted game and to discuss them in a dedicated video!

You are amazing. Your videos are fun to watch and you're a great teacher. I am constantly recommending the Breakout series to people.
I'm going to try to start a Coding/Game Dev club at the school I (hopefully) will be teaching at next year, and I'm going to give them your vids to watch. Keep up the great work!

Thank you for the kind words. Good luck with the Coding Club! Crossing my fingers for you.

Update: Here is where we are at the end of Episode 5

Update: Here is where we are at the end of Episode 8

Update: Here is where we are at the end of Episode 14. Basics all in place. Ready to spice up those explosions!

And here we are after episode 16 with our explosions now being all nice and spicy!

This is after episode 21. To keep things simple we focus on a classic Space Invaders style Shmup. But we do spice it up with special effects like smooth enemy movement.

This is after episode 24. We introduced enemy bullets and learned how to make pretty Bullet Hell-style spread patterns.

This is after episode 27. We have bombs, pickups and everything. Ready for the boss fight!

This is what our Shmup looks like at the end of the Tutorial. We have super action-packed levels and an epic Boss Fight!

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Cherry Bomb has been released!
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=48986