The Issue

In the relatively short amount of time that I've spent creating in PICO-8 and viewing other PICO-8 developers' creations, I've realized that jittery diagonal movement seems to be one of the most common issues in PICO-8 projects. Through online searches, I've seen a few different methods of preventing this problem, but so far I haven't seen anything that also accounts for accelerating/decelerating velocity. The cart and code below showcases the solution (heavily inspired by the code from two of @Krystman's Lazy Devs videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBjZ1W50brM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stoDWgR-kF8) that I'm currently using in a WIP game. I'm wondering what other solutions users have found, and would greatly appreciate feedback on how my current method can be improved.

Notes: the code below is not the same code I am using in my WIP game, so recommendations on how to save tokens or make my code cleaner may not be applicable. Additionally, I am not actually following @Krystman's tutorial series, I only used the aforementioned videos for ideas on this specific issue, so if the code was improved on later in the series, I have not seen it.

[ Continue Reading.. ]