tmountain [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Building PICO-8 games in TypeScript

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 17:59:16 UTC

Hi,

I'm writing to announce tspico8, a project which allows you to create PICO-8 games using TypeScript. For anyone unfamiliar with TypeScript, it's a superset of JavaScript, and it allows you to annotate your code with static type declarations so that the compiler can find a lot of errors for you.

Some of the benefits include:

Write PICO-8 games in a powerful language with a lot of builtin safety
Take advantage of tooling to improve code quality (linting, formatting, etc)
Minify code automatically to reduce token size (multiple configuration options)
Utilize an external spritesheet if you want to (make sprites with aseprite, etc)

For anyone that's curious, the technical details of how this works are as follows:

TypeScript is compiled to JavaScript
JavaScript is minified (compressed and mangled)
Minified JavaScript is transpiled to PICO-8 compatible Lua
Everything is packaged into a cart (code & spritesheet)

PICO-8 reloads automatically on every build to save you time.

Check out the project if you're interested, and let me know what you think. Thanks!

TSPico8 project on Github

Conway's Game of Life

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 21:02:26 UTC

conwaylife

by tmountain

[Click to Play]

Here's a pretty minimal implementation of Conway's Game of Life for PICO-8. It has a basic performance optimization (it only updates the active area of the grid), and you can see the active area adjust by setting dbg=true at the top of the code.

That said, it gets pretty slow pretty quickly for larger simulations.

You set up the grid as follows:

Arrow keys -- move the cursor around.
Z key -- toggle a given cell to active/inactive.
X key -- start / stop the simulation.

If you're unfamiliar with the Game of Life, google it :-).
An easy starting point for a cool pattern is a ten cell contiguous row (10 connected horizontal cells).

There are better PICO-8 Game of Life carts, but I had a lot of fun making this.

Enjoy!

Mandelbrot (Demo)

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 14:25:27 UTC

Mandlebrot (Demo)

by tmountain

[Click to Play]

Mandlebrot fractal renderer with random color cycling.

Pendulum (Demo)

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 14:10:42 UTC

Pendulum

by tmountain

[Click to Play]

Simple demo of pendulum physics.