Mini Survivors
My kids and I were loosely familiar with PICO-8 because of Celeste, and then when two of them got emulation-based handheld game systems they started dabbling. I've spent most of my life programming in a few ways but never actually made a finished game for someone else to play. But my kids and I started in early July 2024 and I figured it could be our summer project. It's our first PICO-8 game, in a pretty-well finished state, in just under a month.
It shouldn't be a hard one to pick up and play. Z/O is used to toggle the music and make menu selections, and the rest of the game is played with arrow keys/control pad.
Although a couple of my kids looked at and consulted on the code a bit their contributions were mostly ideation, with a bit of dabbling in sprites and sound design.






Throughout this month, I've been idly working on a first PICO-8 game with a bit of assistance from my three kids. There's a bit of a story as to where the inspiration came from but I'll spare the details for now.
We've really enjoyed Vampire Survivors for a while and although I've seen a couple of games in this vein for PICO-8, I didn't see them right away and it's maybe a bit underrepresented, I thought? So we went with it. It's not meant to be a demake/adaptation or anything. Among other things, there's no attempt to implement "waves" of enemies.
I think I've figured out everything I wanted to, pretty much, although some movement and targeting could probably be fixed somewhat. Future plans include implementing some form of upgrades/level-ups and pickups. Honestly, I'd like to get that part done in the next 3 days to say it was wrapped in a month.
No particular point to this post right now other than sharing! But feedback is welcome.