I have expanded the circle demo greatly and now instead of a circle it draws a regular polygon. It makes use of player 1 and 2 controls in order to change the position, radius, color, rotation, and number of sides. Try pressing buttons and see what happens!
I have a routine for drawing regular polygons which actually spans several functions. With a few modifications from the C code I was able to make this PICO-8 Lua version that does the same basic thing.
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This is not the first time I have made a Tetris game. However it is the first real game I have published with PICO-8 and I am super excited to share it with the community.
Everything uses standard Player 1 buttons. Arrow keys and Z,X are all you need. I implemented the hold feature using the up arrow.
I am very new to using PICO-8 but I took an example from the manual and modified it so that not only can the circle be moved around but it can also be made bigger or smaller. It might not look impressive to some people but this could be the foundation of making other kinds of games because I only need to modify what happens when the 6 standard buttons are pressed.
function _update()
if (btn(0)) then x=x-1; end
if (btn(1)) then x=x+1; end
if (btn(2)) then y=y-1; end
if (btn(3)) then y=y+1; end
if (btn(4)) then r=r-1; end
if (btn(5)) then r=r+1; end
end
function _draw();
cls(0);
circfill(x,y,r,7);
end
I rewrote my checkerboard demo for the Pico-8 Fantasy Console. This program is amazing. It is probably the closest thing to QBasic which I used to use. However it uses a slightly modified form of Lua that also has graphics commands. In a way it is a lot like using Love2D but I am still quite new to using Pico-8. One of the most notable features is that it has built in ability to record video to a gif file.
Pico-8 is almost like a mini DOS or Linux distribution except that all the programs are written in Lua. It comes with a full manual explaining the features which is available as a text file and also a page on the official website here:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html
I do think that Pico-8 would be a great tool to teach people computer programming for the first time. It would allow learning Lua but also allowing a new person to start with graphics programming.
I am new to this site. I am learning about Pico8 and that is what brought me here. I'm mostly a C programmer but recently started experimenting with Lua partly because I was interested in using PICO-8. I love all things retro and my favorite game of all time is Tetris.
