Not a programmer.
Having fun so my kids can join in.
Concluding that all kids should get their hands on PICO-8 after Scratch.
HMS Repulse's short sharp mission is to repel mines in the unstable asteroid field. Use the ships repulse beam to repel gold explosives converting them to green energy. Then shoot these green orbs to recover energy. Every missed mine depletes your red energy orbs.
[First attempt at anything playable, would dearly appreciate if someone can help me apply and understand functions in tables, and meta-tables to improve the code. I have a few power ups in mind, but really the game is to see if you can last 60 seconds. Please provide me with game feedback, although the difficulty should be easy to adjust in _init().]
4 comments
My kids learn Scratch at a large school. But are bored of it.
They asked the IT crew if they had heard of PICO-8. But no.
Some thoughts after a few weeks messing around (owner a TRS-80 in the mid 80s, an Amiga in the early 90s, and coded Wingz hyperscript on NeXT for a global bank - look that one up!).
It has huge potential for educational use (and doesn't need to be open source). Clearly the ideal is for it to be a console with its constrictions, but perhaps there could be a school-kid version. A few things might help take-up.
- Can just the font/text have better resolution (as per TRS-80, unrelated to the pixels) ?
- Some keyboard interaction (INPUT, INKEY$) would be huge for kids to get feedback into their code.
- A half-bright mode (for the 16 colours) would add a tremendous amount to the brilliant 3d and vector cartridges I’ve seen here).
- A sixth screen/panel for debug. On break it simply lists variables and values and tables (which seem to be the key to LUA but are not immediately intuitive).
[I plan to edit this Blog, is there a way to stop it coming up on the forum updates ?]
Discovered PICO-8 10 days ago, having dredged up TRS-80 and Amiga emulation. Not a programmer.
Just coding stuff to teach myself and pass on to the kids. This isn't a game but just something to add effects to and copy cool code.
I'm going to
- cycle the colours when a target pinged
- create a pulse wave
- animate the targets
- create nouns and verbs to do something
- animate out (switching off CRT to a dot)
- mini frequency graph
etc etc
Anyway does anyone have any pointers on creating SFX for ...
- sonar ping sound
- pulse sound (eg Aliens motion tracker)
- general static.
Cheers.
