It was suggested I post this here, so I'm just going to copy/paste. This is a write-up on how I jumped some hurdles to make my rpg WaGa (having issues uploading the cart to here on my phone, I'll put it on soon)
PICO-8 and limitations
So, indie games are usually made to emulate older games, and follow similar restrictions. That's cool, but older games, at the time, were all trying to break past those restrictions, this gets a bit lost. PICO-8 is a platform given to us that attempts to force us to follow some restrictions, so now we get to make games exactly like older games: pushing those limits.
So recently I made an RPG for PICO-8, WaGa. I hit the token wall pretty quick. I had a lot of data, 50 some items, 8 enemies, enemy groups, stair exits, 4 characters with stats, and a bag that could hold items, and so on. PICO-8 follows a subset of lua, so I had to get fairly creative.
The biggest thing I found I could exploit, by far, is strings. One string is just a variable, and follows the same one token count as any other variable, this really opens things up. The only string function PICO-8 gives you is sub(), which is, as I found, all I needed to get done what I had to get done.
I did need a few other functions though. I needed explode, and I needed a string->number function. I think to myself, if I have these, I can have my entire set of items only take up one token! Had I really wanted to, I could have all of this a step farther, and had one huge database string itself, which i explode into datasets, which i explode into arrays.
Heres an example, my item dataset
--item
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This is mostly done, I'd like some testing and feedback before I'd consider it complete. All thats really left is another song I need to make, barring any major bugs.
https://splixel.itch.io/picocross-rc1?secret=Jp2KRiuGT6wxAMWWTjLVDLPDpHM
It's a picross puzzle game, so the rules are exactly same as picross.
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