This is my first cartridge, and basically my first game. It's based off some really old cribbage AI that I wrote years ago. Ported it over to pico-8 for fun.
It's a bit rushed and some of the logic is sloppy. Still missing a few rules and needs some cleanup on some of the timing but the core is there at least.
My goal was to try and make some AI that was difficult to beat.
I'm a web application developer by day.

Can anyone suggest some resources for a rank newcomer to game coding? I've got enough understanding from playing with c++ in college to understand most of the syntax when I read Pico-8 carts, but it's tough for me to understand what's going in in the more complex parts of the carts. Even jelpi is over my head.
I was hoping I'd learn how to do some basic game mechanics like collision detection, but I'm just going in circles here!

So, one of my carts is counting code in characters instead of tokens. I have no idea what I did to start that.
Here is the cart. I'm pretty stumped.

Can be combined with global palette to create objects that can only be seen in close promixity.
Somewhat bearable performance-wise.
Haxe source: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c885964ca61431a8e90a
I was thinking, what if there was an underpowered handheld spinoff console from the makers of the PICO 8? Sure, it's not as beefy as the original console, but oh the portability!
So this is a really rough prototype: I've built up the PICO JR console as the core game loop of the cartridge, processing input into thumb movement and some really sketchily modeled instinctive controller swerving, with the bulk of the code stuck down below and the actual code for the little in-game game up top in the cart.
My gut take on the specs for this:
- 48*48 pixel four-tone greyscale graphics (so, colors 0, 5, 6, and 7 in the PICO 8 palette)
- 2 channel sound
- dpad and one button (other button could be reserved for meta-game/menu stuff)
- 1 page of sprite sheet
- standard sprite size of 6x6 pixels
- dodgy slow-refresh LCD screen (could simulate this by checking screen buffer every frame and only allowing pixels to move one shade of grey toward whatever the target is)
Right now the tiny little Jump Guy game is just implemented for the screen and palette and sound limitations by me keeping myself honest, but I think the right way to go to do this right would be to write wrapper functions for all the standard PICO 8 calls that do appropriate constraining and sanity checks on the PICO JR specs. (So e.g. pj_sfx() and pj_music() would only accept as valid channels 0 and 1, spr() would only read off the allowed sprite page and would count by 6*6 blocks, etc.)

Because every console needs a (few) Pong port(s).
This is my first Pico-8 project. I've got a lot more ideas for it, and it's not done yet.
Future Plans
- Powerups if a match goes on long enough? Honestly, not sure if this needs it.
- Music
Known Issues
- The AI is occasionally too good at the game.
- Sometimes the ball goes too fast to catch.
Changelog
v4
- Goal sound.
- AI tweaks.
- Ball speedup changes.
v3 - Made the court pretty
- Added a score display
- Made the AI a little easier by making the ball go faster over time.
v2 - Updated the splash screen.
v1

UPDATE 2017-05-16:
VEKTOR2089 is now up for early access on itch.io!
Features:
- Split screen multiplayer
- Trackmania style hotseat multiplayer
- Track editor
- 60 fps
- Multiple cars to choose from with different feels and styles
- 4 speed classes
- Maybe a story mode, we'll see!
New in 1.5.0beta:
- 8 set looping tracks, 3 laps each
- Level editor (needs some more work)
Missing some stuff from the previous version that still needs to be fixed up:
- Boosters
- Narrowing tracks
- Time attack replays
Wipeout inspired racing game!
Z to ACCEL
X to BRAKE
UP to BOOST
LEFT and RIGHT to STEER
Q for MENU
Update 1.2.0:
- Reduced token usage
- Multiple difficulty levels (Easy, Medium, Hard (original difficulty))
Update 1.1.0:
- Somewhat easier AI, might actually be possible to beat them now
- Sharper turning circle
- Nerfed boosting a bit
- Boosted normal acceleration
- Reduced ship size slightly
- Warnings about upcoming turns and narrowing
- Performance improvements
Challenge your ghost or AI racers.
now with music + sound!
5 difficulty levels
in game menu
parallax scrolling foreground

A PICO-8 conversion of my first game.
Controls:
| Up | Left | Down | Right | X / M | Y / N |
| Jump | Stop | Slide | Move Right | Restart | Debug |
It's unfinished, with level 2 just going on forever. The title text animation is blatantly stolen from the Hello World demo cart and fiddled with until it looked different enough to not just be a carbon copy.
This game is different from my usual projects in that I try to teach myself to take time and not rush things, not expect anything from the things I do and not try to make the game sound like any more than it is and post it all over the place. Basically, I want to become a game dev Buddhist, is what I'm saying.
If you wanna download the cart to look at the code yourself, feel free to. I tried to keep all the code as succinct as possible and commented it in an understandable way.
There's a bug where sometimes you can't jump anymore and have to reboot.
I'll keep working on this.






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