Aspiring game developer. I really like character action games. Pico-8 is my dream console - a system (and community!) that encourages fun games that you can customize and tweak.
Volleybally
Simple volleyball game, heavily inspired by Blobby Volley. Still very WIP - score is tracked but the match never ends. Can play two player or against the CPU.
TODO
- graphical juice to the ball
- backgrounds. Different courts
- extra text - match point? set point?
- longer term - single player circuit against different CPU personalities
2 comments
Sally's Star Racers PX
Sally Neptune is back for some mode-7 style racing!
Features
- 8 unique tracks, with different themes, music, and graphics
- 2 circuits for grand prix racing
- a versus mode with a unique scoring system, giving you credit for leading the race as well as winning
- time trials, with times to beat by the developer
- 4 characters to choose from, with different speed and handling.
- try to collect all 47 stars by beating all of the achievements!
- data is saved locally, so you don't need to beat the whole game in one sitting.
How to play
Gameplay only uses three buttons - left and right to steer, and either action button (Z or X on a keyboard) to go. Releasing the gas will automatically make you brake. If you turn while releasing the gas, you can take turns tightly. Taking a long, drifting turn then hitting the gas will give you a boost!
20 comments
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I want to keep working on my racing game, Sally's Star Racers, and I want to have a "dev" branch where I and others can try playing it online. Rather than pushing a million updates to the "finished" post, I plan to do lots of little updates here, then eventually push a new version to the finished post once it is ready.
UPDATES
New feature - Zippers
- only implemented on Fast Fields right now. These are boost pads that give you a burst of speed when you drive over them.
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Changes:
- Lots of code restructuring to better differentiate between three states: driving (gas held down), braking (no gas or directions), and drifting (no gas but steering).
17 comments
A minimal demo showing how I set up the mode 7 effect for Sally's Star Racers ( https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=181063#p ). This is a cleaner starting point if you want to make your own mode7 game. 1355 tokens, and it includes a lot of boilerplate for crawling map data and instantiating actors in the world.
I am using ToyBoxJam assets for this demo, so thanks to @thattomhall and the contributors to this asset pack!
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Sally's Star Racers
Race and drift with Sally Neptune in her debut kart racer!
X or Z to go, left and right to steer. You can drift by releasing the gas during a turn - doing so will build up your boost meter. You will need to boost in order to win the grand prix!
Try out the time trials, and see if you can beat my times.
Made for Toy Box Jam 2025! Thanks to @thattomhall for organizing, and to the Toy Box Jam team for preparing all assets used in this game.
FYI... if you are here cuz you are interested in making a mode 7 game, you may want to check out my stripped-down boilerplate code here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=154170 . This will give you the bare minimum (1355 tokens) to achieve a mode 7 effect. It's a better starting point for making your own game than hacking this cart.
22 comments
A racing game I am working on for Toy Box Jam 2025.
Left and right to steer. X (button 4, x) to go. If you let go of X while turning, you will build up a boost. Kinda like mario kart, but more directly inspired by Kirby Air Riders.
UPDATE Dec 30 2025 - 4 tracks are now in. Only time trial mode works currently. Try to get a record time!
UPDATE 2 dec 30 - VS race is up an running. Race against some very unfair AI!
UPDATE 3 dec 30 - GP is running. Can you win the most points?
UPDATE 4 Jan 2 - lots of graphics updates. Game plays the same.
UPDATE 5 Jan 3 - probably done at this point. HUD and sounds implemented.
2 comments
WIP for a precision platformer. I am trying to make a 100 level game! Feedback is welcome.
2 comments
Smash The Scorpions!
A silly game for Ludum Dare 56, the theme of which is "Tiny Creatures."
Directions to move. Any action button to swing your hammer. See how long you can last!
Changelog:
- 2024-10-11 - fixed walk speed bug. added some extra graphical effects. increased the blood!
4 comments
Cobb's Adventure
Help Cobb on his adventure to eat as much food as possible!
This is HEAVILY inspired by Adventure Island, a wonderful game series from the mid-80s, although I am most familiar with the Gameboy adaptations in the early 90s.
Features:
- 8 different environments
- Never play the same game twice! Levels are randomly generated every playthrough
- Easy to learn, hard to master - once you can beat the game, go for 3 stars on your score or times!
I strongly recommend a gamepad for this game. If you are committed to keyboarding, consider pressing "Enter" to open the menu, and set "AutoRun" to "ON" so that you dont need to hold a key to run.
7 comments
A little Adventure Island (or Wonder Boy for some of you) -like that I have been working on. I want to test it easily on my Rg353, and its just easier to grab it from SPLORE than to do the whole song and dance with an sd card.
It might be buggy! And no sound yet! Lemme know what you think.
July 20, 2024: So, life has been quite busy! New job! Baby coming in two months! My new job has been very intellectually fulfilling, so, sadly, I have not been doing a lot of gamedev. But I really want to finish this game! Uploading a new version:
- soundtrack!
- tons of sound effects!
- new name! Cobb's Adventure!
- lots of little tweaks here and there.
At this point, all i really want to to is spiff up the boss and maybe add some scoreboards. I think it's pretty fun.
3 comments
Bitty Dig
A small digging game made for Low Rez Jam 2023.
Use your arrow keys to dig. You will need to collect stars to get air. Try to find an efficient path through the blocks.
Tip: You can jump by pressing up, and you can move side to side a bit while jumping.
I really want to make a slower-paced drilling game. I might continue to poke at this for balance.
8 comments
100 Meters to Shade
Ludum Dare link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/1000-meters-to-shade
My entry to LD51, where the theme is "Every 10 Seconds." Use the arrow keys to navigate 1000 meters to the right, towards shade. When a solar flare is coming, hide in the shade of a cactus.
Thanks for playing!
13 comments
Hot Diggin'
A game in less than 1kb for PICO-1K jam 2022
Help Digson get away from the falling lava! Dig as fast as you can! Why is the lava falling? Who knows!
HOW TO PLAY:
- arrow keys (or gamepad DPAD) - move left and right
- action button (Z,C, or N on keyboard, "A" on XBOX gamepad) - dig!
- you can dig left and right by holding that direction while digging. Otherwise, you will try to dig down. You can only dig when your feet are on hard ground.
- Your only goal is to outrun the falling lava. Touching red blocks will make the lava run faster. You can dig through red blocks, but doing so will GREATLY speed up the lava, so try to avoid this.
11 comments
Only gamepads 0-3 are recognized by pico-8
Hi folks,
I can't seem to get pico8 to recognize gamepads beyond 4. Granted, my testing mechanism is a little haphazard, but I am confident it is working correctly.
Test procedure
Since I don't actually own enough gamepads to test this, I am using a python script to create "virtual" gamepads on my machine. Script for this is here: https://github.com/paloblanco/bros_mansion/blob/master/gamepad_test.py . This script registers 8 controllers, then just presses the a button once a second (which ought to get a response from my game).
Here's a screenshot of the whole setup. Note that windows recognizes 8 gamepads being plugged in.
desktop while running gamepad test script
I wait 3 seconds in between "plugging in" controllers so that I can watch them get registered in pico8. Only the first 4 get registered. I can't catch a gif of the joystick prompt appearing, so you will have to take my word for it.
2 comments
Big Mapper
Click here for Github Repo for BigMapper
This is a utility for pico8, designed for editing map data. It will eventually be expanded upon, allowing you to edit and save to the pico8 extended memory. Its current major feature is allowing you to edit maps at 256x256 pixels, giving you a lot of breathing room.
I have chosen not to upload this to the bbs, for two reasons:
- It doesn't run properly on the web, due to the inability to pass commandline arguments to pico8 at startup.
- This is very much a "dev" tool, and not having it on your local PC doesn't make sense for its intended use case.
That being said, I encourage you to check it out, if for no other reason than to see how nice it is to have high-res utilities, and to see how easy it is to make them!
Setup
This cannot be run standalone - it must be run from the pico8 desktop client.
0 comments
Mansion Bros
A fan game of a certain green fellow's exploits in trying to clean a mansion that is full of ghosts. Suck up ghosts, unlock doors, and find the trophy to conquer the mansion. Up to 8 players!
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of the characters appearing in this game. This is a work of fanart, and I have no intention to profit from this work.
How to play
Arrows to move, any action button to use your vacuum. Suck up ghosts and find the trophy.
Other players can join in by pressing their action buttons. Game ends if all players run out of health. See if you can find every single diamond!
Tips
11 comments
Hi!
I am working on a 3D raycaster game. It's largely working; see the gif below:
I am basically using zep's cast demo as a starter - if you look through my code you will see his draw_3d() function, albeit pretty heavily hacked at this point. I use tline() to draw my walls, and i apply a fillp() based on distance from the camera to get a (currently ugly) dithered lighting effect.
I would like to do the same thing for my floors! Except, I am drawing my floors vertically. See the next gif:
I only draw a floor (vertical line() downward) if my casted ray hits a wall OR a new tile type (thats how i get different floor colors).
Anyone have a cpu-conservative tip for how I could get a gradient similar to my walls on the floor? I COULD draw the floors first as a flood-fill, but this would ignore different colors and elevations. I can't think of any way to apply a smart horizontal-fill strategy, which would allow me to apply fillp() based on distance from the camera.
10 comments
My entry for Toy Box Jam 3, 2022. Help Sally Neptune escape from the evil Monocronies!
- Move: arrow keys
- Shoot and strafe: X. This will strafe if you are not targeting something, and will let you circle-strafe a target.
- Jump: Z or C
- Tips:
- You will need keys to open doors.
- Look for the giant Neptune coin to escape!
- There are gun powerups around that will let your rainbow gun shoot faster. Try to find them all!
I've always wanted to make a game based on the cast.p8 demo, and this is it! I am very happy with how sprite occlusion turned out.
I wrote this game in multiple files, so it may be tough to read in the pico8 editor. When I get a repo up on github, I'll update this in case anyone wants to see how I made this. Enjoy!
7 comments
WARNING - sudden flashing lights and sounds.
The Greatest Thing
by PBG
My entry for the ludum dare 48 jam. Go on a pitfall-esque adventure in search of the greatest thing ever.
Arrow keys to move, Z/C jump, X/V carry things.
hotfix1 - fixed softlock in climbing room
hotfix2 - decided not to be a jerk and gave back key repeating by holding a button
10 comments
Classing Example
While I like lua, it drives me crazy that it does not contain a simple class constructor like python, or newer version of javascript. I find the metatable concept to be very awkward and difficult to adjust to, coming from other scripting languages.
Here, I am demonstrating how I typically handle my actor objects when making games using an object-oriented approach. I like all of my game entities (like the player and NPC characters) to be their own objects with methods that are common to them (update and draw being the main needed items).
The snippet here is my starting templet for most of my games. The "Actor" table is my default object. The method "New" can be used for two things:
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