Features undulating rainbow bobs, and per-scanline palette changes. Bobs use color indices 0-31 which are Picotron's default colors for all 4 palettes. The background uses indices 32-63 on all 4 palettes randomly set at start and when you hit a button, and the scanline table is reset every frame to oscillate the sections rendering each palette. 160 colors on screen! Feel free to steal utility functions, I had fun figuring out the bit packing for setting up the scanline table correctly.
I'd love it if some of you far better coders helped me make this demo cooler.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=submit&respond_to=rainbow_bobs-0
2025-01-09 updates:
Title Screen! (WIP)
Difficulty adjustments:
powerup drop chance reduced significantly
increased size of smallest asteroid fragments, scaled up asteroids overall
screen shake!
2025-01-04 updates:
More particles, asteroid trails, thruster
sound effects for pickups, shield hit, player death
asteroid spawn rate adjusted for difficulty
the bug I'm seeing with running in browser on the BBS on 0.1.1e-dev2 persists, but the cart works great if you download it and run on 0.1.1d.
2024-12-31 v4 Updates:
Particle effects polish, explosion particles
powerups: shield boost, temporary 3 bullet spread gun
classic asteroids drone background music WIP
background planet via abledbody's sphere impostor
V3 update: Added vector graphics via Sophie's VGFX editor and library.
Starfield background.
Some sound effects are in.
UFO fly-by worth 5000 points is in, WIP
My first browser JavasScript game was an Impact-engine Asteroids clone titled "Planetoid Decimator" so my first Picotron game will bear the same name, as I learn the basics of lua and Picotron game development.




My first cart! I saw another matrix screensaver here somewhere, decided I needed to one-up it a bit. :D
Features a customized palette, renders most of the font characters for that more 'code' look and not just alpha characters, and multiple streams per screen column. It is thoroughly commented, but nothing really complex going on here.
I'm having so much fun with Picotron! I had followed pico-8 community for years but the resolution was a little too low for my liking. With Picotron I feel right at home, its the same resolution and number of colors I've used for my JS13K engine coincidentally. Looking forward to porting a few of my projects and many new ones.
Cheers!
Ryan
Update: columns don't die for another 12 columns off bottom of screen, first version had streams dying at max y.