Blog post: http://yal.cc/introducing-hxpico8/
Repository: https://github.com/YellowAfterlife/hxpico8
Examples: https://github.com/YellowAfterlife/hxpico8xm
In short, this project permits to use Haxe programming language to create programs for PICO-8 (by transpiling Haxe into PICO-8's flavour of Lua).
This grants you classes, compile-time optimizations, constant and function inlining, and a whole bunch of other "syntactic sugar" features while keeping the output size reasonably small.
For example, this class compiles to this .p8.
Obviously, you can do more complex things with it too.
Have fun :)
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This is a small demo that I've been showing on Twitter/Tumblr yesterday. Currently there isn't much going on other than concept demonstration (and most of "engine" code needed). The code is laid out to allow taking it in various directions from here.
Source code
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Local multiplayer! Two cowboy dudes are shuffling around the saloon and get into a tense situation somehow. What should they do? Shoot? Hide? Nothing?
Button 1 (P1: Z, P2: Tab) fires, button 2 (P1: X, P2: Q) hides. Make your decision quickly, because doing nothing is very risky!
I'm calling this finished because I mayyyy at some point want to spruce it up, but I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, least of all my own.
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Just making a switch to turn audio on and off.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to make a switch that turns on off on off etc...
My just go on and off once.
Thank you.
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Updated to 1.01
Beware! Aliens have invaded earth! Of course - we are the aliens...
[i]On behalf of High Commander XL'ARGH - you have been tasked to fetch the puny humans for our gruesome experiments etc. The mothership is too valuable to risk for close quarters operations. Therefore we dispatch you - our great minion T'URD with smaller crafts to capture specimens with your tractor beam and carry them upwards into thinner atmosphere so that they can be collected by the mothership. Beware that the ship will lose movement speed when you activate the tractor beam with holding down your big ACTION BUTTON. Good luck, and break a tentacle!
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OK here's an idea for a little pico8 gamejam.
48 hours over a weekend.
Day 1. Come up with a game, (it should have the basic mechanics and gameplay but doesn't need to be polished, leave some space for day 2: 4096 token limit!!!) and submit it here.
Day 2. It gets given to another jammer at random to complete and polish.
It'll be a good way to see how other people work and forces you to do both the game design and the polishing/juicing sides.
What do you think?
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I was going to make a game, but I've been putting it off a lot so I figured I'd share the sprites I was going to use instead.
Besides that I'm pretty new to LUA.
I'll probably start with something less ambitious.
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So I've made a few carts now, and am enjoying the hell out of it. Primarily for the joy of just building things, but also for the implicit little bit of roleplaying involved: I'm not just programming a game, I'm programming a game for a fictional console from another universe, from another time. I'm not just me, really; I'm the company that would have existed to be producing these things. I'm some scrappy no-budget third-party game dev concern from alternate universe 198X.
And a game company needs a brand identity.
And so: I came up with a name and drew a logo, and wrote up a little basically self-contained function to do a quick splash screen render, using a single 2*2 sprite:
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This is a quick version of that game known as RHINO on the CBM PET. Googling has told me that this was written by Jeff Minter.
Still a lot to do but the basic gameplay works. Don't get trampled!
See how sausage is made: https://github.com/wstephenson/rhino
v0.6
- Pincho Edition!
v0.5
- Add attract mode. Not very attractive yet
- Implement lives. Extra life every 4 levels
- Implement high score
- Add game mode (easy/hard)
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Update 8/9/2015
Added a lot to this, now that I had some more time.
-The dragon can now burn things with Z. He cannot move while burning, adding a little strategy. This whole little fire system took me over 2 hours to figure out how to do. Shameful really, but it all works beautifully and now I don't need to poke it. (I hope.)
-Burning snacks will leave gold pickups of random values behind. These show up as single pixel drawn pickups.
-Collecting gold will add to your gold amount.
-Flying over the hoard in the center will "deposit" the gold into your hoard. The hoard also updates it's graphical representation based on how much is in it(with cap on the amount of scaling to keep it sane).
-A few new sound effects. Snacks can now scream when burned, and the fire of course has a looping sound while it's hit area is active.
-Eaten enemies sometimes manage to scream before the dragon munches on them. I thought it was funny at 4 AM to make it random. Don't ask.
-Enemy ai is updated a bit in prep for later. Now in addition to random wandering, they also move closer to the hoard. I eventually plan to make them steal gold and attempt to run, adding to their gold amount when defeated, and potentially taking it off screen for good. For now they all just crowd into the middle eventually. The dragon says it's very convenient for eating them.
-Updated the print commands to set the color before printing. This fixes a bug adding the gold had created. Yay for saved drawing color commands.
original first post:
The cart title is a terrible pun, I know. No, I'm not sorry. More puns might, or might not, be on their way.
NOM ALL THE THINGS!
Well, currently only little silly people that walk around randomly and even sometimes straight into your belly. Not very bright really. Tasty though.
Ok, so it [i]might
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Hi, I'm wondering if there is no way to download pico8 for free, I have to purchase voxatron to get pico8?, Thanks
And by the way, if we have to purchase it, then that's the wrong marketing estrategy, a tool with features for developing 2d retro games for everyone, millions of users would make their own games and twitt them , publish them, just my oppinion.
Thanks for your answers guys
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What will be the long-term view on publishing games made for Pico-8? Will developers be able to post them elsewhere? Will devs be able to charge for the games?
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Quick little bit of silliness, inspired by the awkward little grand piano minigame/toy in that spooky mansion in Final Fantasy VII.
Use Z to toggle right hand, X to toggle higher chords/notes, arrow keys to play a chord or note.
Question: the thing I'd like to do with this is check to see if a sound is already playing on a given channel before I play another, so that e.g. btnp() doesn't keep retriggering a given note or chord every 4 frames if the player holds the button down instead of tapping. I'm guessing I'd have to peek() at a specific bit of memory, but I have no idea where!
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So after having a play with PICO for a while I've decided to sink my teeth in. I suspect I'm going to run out of tokens on this unless I get smart about how I implement enemy racers.
Cursor keys to control the ship, final game will have 9 stages (currently it doesn't check for end of game).
8/1/2015 - So far I've been focusing on the momentum of the ship and movement of the ground.
Next tasks...
-- add engine jets to each side
-- add engine noise
-- change the colour of the grid when you change stages
-- check when you've reached the end of stage 9
-- add enemy ships to bump into
-- bullets
-- lasers
-- music
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I was wondering how long it would take me to build a partial version of PONG and I was kind of amazed that nobody really built a PONG for Pico-8 up to now. It misses a number of features but I created at in a few hours while listening to some conference talks at Eurucamp 2015 and I will hopefully give a lightning talk on PICO-8 tomorrow.
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One thing that would be super handy for development in Pico-8 is an "assert" function which throws an error when a condition isn't met and can optionally print something in response, like the standard lua one.
eg.
assert(x != 0,"this shouldn't happen")
Another nice thing would be a way to write output to a console. you can do this with print, but it usually gets overwritten immediately and lost in the event you need to check up on some history.
log("frame: "..frame.." x is "..x)
also showing a full backtrace on error rather than only the head of the stack would be super helpful.
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