I’m Mark Egli:
I made this game.
I beat these ZPG puzzles.
And nothing else.
This cart is a few things:
It’s a branching music demo featuring music from Robby Duguay’s excellent “Nine Songs in PICO-8” cart.
It’s a proof of concept for my PICO-8 dynamic music engine, which I have dubbed “Zero-Track”.
And finally, this cart is an invitation:
If you write music and would like to try out writing something non-linear for the PICO-8, feel free to drop me a line; it would be awesome to work with music written explicitly for this sort of use.
If you are working on a game and would like to include music dynamically tied to what's happening in the game, I'd love to see if my music engine could be a good fit for your game, as well.


I built a Raspberry Pi PICO-8 console that uses floppy disks, but SPLORE doesn't work great for browsing a floppy: you have to wait for the preview image of a cart to load before you can scroll past it. For a disk with more than one or two cartridges on it, this is a frustrating experience. Additionally, SPLORE is a little finicky about reloading the floppy contents if you swap out the disk.
To get around this, I boot this cartridge instead of booting into SPLORE, which provides a quicker floppy browsing experience and correctly picks up a new disk if you choose "reset cart" from the menu. It's a pretty rough hack, but I'm sharing it here in case anyone finds any pieces of it useful.





