The theme for the second PICO-8 Jam was Chain Reaction, and there were 35 entries. Thanks to everyone who contributed and made this jam a another splendid event. I hope you'll join me in congratulating the winning entry, which received a whopping 7.3 PICO-8 star average.. theatrically opens invisible envelope
NuSan! With Combo Pool.
As a token of gratitude for laying down this most excellent cartridge, NuSan will be receiving a commemorative cross-stitch based on the cart.
Also highly rated by participants was another disarming production by JTE: Nora's Mouse Chase, and the beautifully chaotic SPACETANK 9000 by arnodick.
You can play all of the entries by clicking on this montage:
That was fun -- let's do it again sometime soon!
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If you'd like to take part in P8JAM2, please select one or more themes by clicking on the PICO-8 star next to it (you need to be logged in). You can change it anytime before the 24h voting phase ends -- at 00:00 PST on Saturday the 21st. Check out the jam thread for more details.
Edit: times's up! The winning theme is Chain Reaction. You have 9 days! Good luck!
Hey All
I'm in the process of simplifying the website a little. In particular, I wanted to improve the experience of playing cartridges in threads by removing clutter. They now look more like a page dedicated to the cart:
- The player starts open
- There's a big obvious play button and large thumbnail
- There's no banner at the top of each page
I removed the PLAY buttons from the thread previews, and autoplay, as I think they're no longer needed -- the whole playable region of a cart is now visible without scrolling after opening the cart's thread, and it's more obvious to new visitors what to do next.
There are still a few small things to finish, but let me know what you think of the new layout, and if there's anything that bugs you.
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Time for another jam! EDIT: The theme is Chain Reaction.
EDIT2:
and... that's time! Thanks everyone who contributed a cartridge! If you submitted something with the p8jam2 tag, you can now rate other p8jam2-tagged carts at the top of the cart's thread.
If you'd like to continue working on your cartridges, feel free -- but please leave the compo version at the top of the p8jam2-tagged threads until voting finishes in one week (June 5, 24:00 PST). Good luck!
Same deal as last time, except with some limited theme voting:
Duration: The Jam will take place from 00:00 PST on Saturday the 21st of May 2016 and will finish at 24:00 PST on Sunday the 29th. So, it spans 2 weekends and 5 weekdays. You can spend as much or little time on your carts as you like. Tiny silly cartridges are more than welcome.
Theme: As is customary with other jams, a theme will be posted at the start and the goal is simply to make a cart (or some carts) during the jam that reflect your interpretation of the theme. Any type of cartridge is ok: games, toys, demos, music carts or pixels.
This time, the theme will be selected by a small twitter poll that begins 24 hours before the jam starts.
Submitting: To submit or update a jam cart before the deadline, just tag it with p8jam2. You can update your cartridge as often as you like before the deadline.
Voting: Jam participants will be able to use a voting widget on all p8jam2-tagged carts, and exactly 1 week after the jam finished, ratings will be tallied.
There will be a small mystery prize for the highest rated cart, but you should enter for glory and honor (or just for kicks).
During the jam, you'll be able to view all carts and posts tagged with p8jam2.
Rules: Teams / collaborations are allowed, in which case you should nominate one user to be the submitter (and voter). Re-using existing PICO-8 cart material is allowed as long as it is ok by the author, and that the carts are publicly available before the jam starts. Submissions should be mostly new material created during the jam, but it's ultimately up to other participants making ratings to decide what's cool and what's not.
If you're looking for a complete portable PICO-8 solution, good news! PICO-8 is going to ship pre-installed on Next Thing Co.'s upcoming PocketC.H.I.P. -- a complete portable mini-computer with built-in storage, wifi, keyboard, battery, touchscreen and everything else PICO-8 needs! The last few months, I've been working closely with the team at Next Thing Co. to create "PICO-8 C" -- a fully functioning and compatible edition designed to integrate nicely with NTC's hardware and software. It will be available to Kickstarter backers, or you can also pre-order one for just $49 bucks.
You can read more about the PocketC.H.I.P. over at getchip.com
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Here's 0.1.6! You can download it from your updates page while you're logged in, or from your Humble Store Library. Just a reminder, that if you're a Voxatron alpha customer, you also own PICO-8! (it should show up automatically in both places).
By far the biggest change is the addition of SPLORE, a complete bbs and local cartridge explorer. You can run it by typing SPLORE, or start PICO-8 with "pico-8 -splore". If you plug a joystick in and auto-boot into splore, it's possible to navigate everything using only the 6 buttons + menu button.
This version also has a lot of new data storage functionality. Cartridges can cstore() to themselves in order to save extra data, and this is now officially supported on the web, so don't feel like it's a weird hack that's going to break! (actually it might break, but it's supported, so I'll fix it :p). Here's a demo:
Notes on cartridge storage, and the full change log:
This is a demo of the new cartridge storing in 0.1.6. (you'll need to update to 0.1.6 if you load this in PICO-8)
Press O (mapped to Z or C) to save the screen, and X to restore it. The cursor position is not saved.
To save, the screen is copied to the sprite sheet and then stored for clarity -- but it could have just been a straight cstore(0x0, 0x6000, 0x2000), and same again in reverse when restoring.
if (btn(4)) then memcpy(0x0,0x6000,0x2000) cstore() end if (btn(5)) then len = reload() memcpy(0x6000,0x0,0x2000) end |
This should also work in your browser, even if you close it and run the cartridge again. Please let me know if it doesn't!
Note that in 0.1.6 you can also cstore to separate cartridge files, meaning we can have quite large save games, and also saved data shared between carts on the bbs.
A build of PICO-8 0.1.5 is now available for Raspberry Pi! Check your updates page or look in your Humble library under the Linux downloads section.
It works in fullscreen under either X Windows or directly from the terminal (using directfb). For speed, the default resolution is 280,280; you can set this with the -width and -height switches:
pico8 -width 720 -height 480
Known issues:
- After quitting, keypresses during the session are sometimes dumped to terminal (annoying if you quit by typing shutdown instead of CTRL-Q!)
- Freeze on exit (observed on a zero)
- Some math-heavy cartridges (e.g. /demos/cast.p8) don't run at full speed on first generation models.
There are two builds included in the archive. pico8 is compiled statically (so no need to install SDL2), and pico8_dyn dynamically loads libraries, in case you'd like to supply your own SDL2.
Have fun, and please post pictures if you get pico-8 running on any cute displays!
This weekend (20th, 21st) I'll be at Tokyo Demo Fest 2016, giving a short PICO-8 seminar at 3pm on Sunday, and also making a wee demo for the Wild compo (also in PICO-8, naturally). If you're in Tokyo, come along! The venue is larger than last year -- 3331 Arts Chiyoda, which is around 8 minutes walk from Akihabara station. You can find the registration page and more information here.
Here's a 4k demo from last year (it won the combined pc section):
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Hey All
Here's a quick update with music copying and keyboard configuration for controller buttons.
To configure buttons, use KEYCONFIG from the commandline.
To copy a song from one cartridge to another:
- In the song editor, click on the start pattern and then shift-click on the end pattern that you want to transport. They should light up green.
- Control-C to copy the pattern data, along with the sfx they point to.
- Load the cart you want to paste into, open the song view and click on the pattern index you want to paste to.
- CTRL-V to paste. When pasting a song, any SFX that are needed are written to unused slots and then the pattern indexes are adjusted accordingly.
Changelog:
v0.1.5
Added: Keyboard configuration for player buttons (KEYCONFIG)
Added: Music tracker select / copy / paste
Added: Single-level undo in audio tools
Added: Live preview of frequencies in sound editor
Fixed: Command history extends past last reboot
Fixed: Sfx exporter broken
Fixed: Slashes at end of path resolve to double slashes
Fixed: Load cart from commandline under Windows
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Every day, Professor Miggles goes to work. And every day he snoozes in bed until the last possible moment. To keep the points you get for snoozing, make sure to head out in time without forgetting to put your trousers on.
v1.1: Fixed high score bug, and added persistent high score (when played from pico-8)
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Hey All, I hope you had a great new year!
PICO-8 0.1.4 builds are live on the updates page and on Humble. The main features of this update are:
Friendlier Token Counting
Pairs of brackets and block deliminations now count as one token each, and local declarations do not count at all. You can now fit in around 30% more code because of this, and there is less need for odd space-saving techniques (e.g. using blah"" instead of blah()), or getting rid of local variables. It does mean you're more likely to hit the compressed code limit (use INFO to check), but I don't think this will be a problem. The raw character limit has also been increased from 32k to 64k.Importing / Exporting Data
import() and export() can now load and save the sprite sheet: export("something.png") and sfx: export("something.wav"). These aren't very flexible yet, but in future they'll be able to do things like grabbing particular sets of sprites, or only importing into empty slots.External Cartridge Data Access
reload() and cstore() now take an optional 4th parameter: a filename to grab the data from or store the data to. This is useful for making custom tools, or doing fancy data management. It's intended at this point mainly as a development tool, and isn't supported by the exporter or BBS player. But of course, you can do what you like with it :PHere's Let's Karate being gradually replaced with data from Jelpi during runtime:
Changelog:
Voxatron 0.3.4 builds are live on the updates page and on Humble.
This is a quick bug-fixing update, mostly responding to issues in the 0.3.3 thread.
Changes:
Hey All
I've been doing some spring cleaning, and updated all of the older Lexaloffle games: Neko Puzzle (which is now free), Swarm Racer, Chocolate Castle, Zen Puzzle Garden, Swarm Racer and Swarm Racer 3000. If you had any trouble running these games on newer versions of OSX or 64-bit Linux, these versions should work out of the box.
SR3K also has some new wall rendering and analogue joystick support. I've been chipping away at it very sporadically but it's on slow burn until after Voxatron is finished. An 8-track preview is available to any Lexaloffle customers.
You can find downloads on the game pages, or your updates page / Humble Library page.
User-made ZPG and Chocolate Castle puzzles are also back up with new HTML5 players. You can post puzzles by saving them to clipboard and then pasting the puzzle text into a BBS post.
EDIT: 0.3.3b patch is now up; if you tried 0.3.3 from a clean install and got stuck on the title menu, see this post.
Voxatron 0.3.3 builds are now up! Check your updates page for downloads, now including a native 64-bit Linux version. Builds should be up on Humble soon too (check the version number on the files).
Main new features of interest are: integrated music tracker, custom inventories, multiplayer selection and room transition logic, new microscripting events and better activation control, improved water physics. Check out cartridges in the ALPHA CARTS menu: The Jelly Room, Chaos Fortress to see some of these in action. I'll post a more complex demo of custom inventories and weapon switching soon.
Bloot (also under ALPHA CARTS) is now completely playable as a 2P-4P game, with match scoring and end-game logic completely made from microscripting. To select a player, press action once to join, and then once more to select the player (or left / right to change selection). If you want to try it out without a second human around to play with, you can join P2 and then hoist and carry them through the door to begin the game.
There's a script editor in this version (under the new NEW OBJECT fold-out menu), but it doesn't do much yet. Scripting is the last major component of Voxatron engine, and v0.3.3 contains a lot of new code to get it working -- all of the interactions between objects now run through an abstracted event layer because of this. This affected many legacy carts, and I'm still working on improving backwards compatibility.
For a top-level view of the project's progress and what's coming up, check out the new feature-wise Development Map. In the short term, check back for more demos, tutorials and documentation!
Changelog:
"A Jelly is nothing but Jelly with more Jelly" -- Nietzsche
A silly demo cartridge for Voxatron 0.3.3 -- collect the jellies to become more powerful and make it back to the jelly room.
if it doesn't load for you in the offline binaries, you need to update!
Hey All,
Here's the final changelog for 0.3.3, which will be live on Monday.
The first PICO-8 Jam has ended, and peer ratings have been tabulated and verified. Thanks so much to all participants for making the jam a wonderful event and for producing an excellent collection of rain-themed cartridges. It was a close one, with only a difference of 0.04 PICO-8 stars (out of 8) between the two highest-rated entries. With an average of 6.92 stars, the winner is.. drumroll..
Frog Home! By JTE! white noise cheering sound
Congratulations JTE, and you'll be receiving a small prize in the mail from PICO-8 HQ -- a commemorative plastic coaster depicting your cartridge, along with a PICO-8 canvas bag.
With an extremely close 6.88 stars, is Benjamin Soulé's Rainmaker:
Also close behind were Rain Culture by NuSan, Tea by moonmagic, and the equally heart-melting Rainy Day Friends by electricgryphon.
Stay tuned for the next Jam, which will be in the first quarter of 2016. And if you're not burnt out from jamming or missed this one, join me for Ludum Dare this coming weekend!
You can view all of the P8JAM1 entries here, or directly play the carts mentioned in this post below.
And the theme for PICO-8 JAM #1 is...
Rain
You have 9 days. Good luck!
The first PICO-8 Jam is approaching!
Following on from this thread, here's an invite cart to make it legit:
Duration: The Jam will take place from 00:00 PST on the 21st of November 2015 and will finish at 24:00 PST on the 29th. So, it spans 2 weekends and 5 weekdays. You can spend as much or little time on your carts as you like. Tiny silly cartridges are more than welcome.
Theme: As is customary with other jams, a theme will be posted at the start and the goal is simply to make a cart (or some carts) during the jam that reflect your interpretation of the theme. Any type of cartridge is ok: games, toys, demos, music carts or pixels.
Submitting: To submit or update a jam cart before the deadline, just tag it with p8jam1. You can update your cartridge as often as you like before the deadline.
Voting: UPDATE: I'll have a new (but still simple) rating system in place before the end of the jam. Participants will be invited to rate other jam entries on a single scale, and exactly 1 week after the jam finishes, ratings will be tallied.
There will be a small mystery prize for the highest rated cart, but you should enter for glory and honor (or just for kicks).
UPDATE2: the rating system is now live. If you have submitted a p8jam1-tagged cartridge, you'll be able to see the rating interface at the top of any p8jam1 thread.
Rules: Teams / collaborations are allowed, in which case you should nominate one user to be the submitter (and voter). Re-using existing PICO-8 cart material is allowed as long as it is ok by the author, and that the carts are publicly available before the jam starts. Submissions should be mostly new material created during the jam, but it's ultimately up to other participants making ratings to decide what's cool and what's not.
Dev logs: If you want to make posts about your progress, design ideas, or anything else related the jam, feel free to put them in the PICO-8 Blogs section also tagged with p8jam1. Don't be shy!
During the jam, you'll be able to view all carts and posts tagged with p8jam1.
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