With Zep's RLE compression thingy you can now store an absurd amount of graphical data. This means short FMVs are technically possible, if unwieldy.
I don't know what to use it for besides converting porn GIFs to Pico-8's palette and playing them over an energetic chiptune backbeat, though?
5 comments
UPDATE: Hey look! I updated it (above), and fixed the bug where when the laser made contact with the enemy, it spazzed out for a second. Enjoy!(?)
Here's my first publicly-available game made with the Pico-8! It's a space shooter where you play as a Nroctrion star-cruiser, and have to fend off the evil cihptnueians and save your home-world.
CONTROLS:
Left and Right Arrow Keys to move
Z to fire
NOTE: This is an alpha build of the game. (Very few) new features will be coming.
Also, feedback is highly appreciated! Thanks :)
1 comment
I'll admit that I'm a bit new to PICO-8 and don't have a good handle on how it's built. Maybe other language support isn't trivial.
That said, I'd love to be able to use a subset of something like Ruby, Javascript, or Python in addition to the current Lua based subset.
Is there a chance we'll see other languages in the future?
3 comments
Hi everyone!
I'm an absolut fan of Pico-8 and I spend a lot of hours reading this forum, many of them in my smartphone or my tablet.
I love running cartridges when I have a free time (without the possibility of use my computer). And, I can't do anything because in mobiles phones or tablets we can't take a virtual keyboard when we are running a game so...
Can you add an option to pico webplayer in order to give a solution to this?
Or... have anyone any idea how to play cartridges with smartphones?
Thanks a lot!!
1 comment
Got pico today.
Spent the past few hours writing a bunch of matrix math in lua. To celebrate I made a perspective-correct rotating cube :D
4 comments
Hi,
i've been thinking about something for pico-8 that could be nice: Having a kind of online high score rankings by game on the website.
Let's say the easiest way to do it first would be just in the web player on that site with logged in users.
API can be as minimal as score(value). The advantage of the opaque function is that it can redirect score anywhere (online db for webplayer, local file when ran from pico-8 sdk, silently ignored...)
This kind of feature is cool as it gives game dev more feedbacks on their games as well as increasing their replay value. Plus the community will benefit from that as it gives another axis to consolidate it.
I'm aware it is not that trivial to implement and it requires some work but I love the idea!
2 comments
Hello everyone.
I bought pico8 like a week ago after my friend kept linking me awesome stuff on the forum here. The "exercise" and "now is fornever" ones were particularly inspiring to me.
On the weekend I sat down to make this scrolling background thing and then I just kept running with it. It's mostly a ton of lines, circles, and the mod operator. There isn't much point to it. You can press left and right to change speed, press up to randomise the palette, and down to reset those changes.
EDIT: 42 stars!
37 comments
Here's a fun little project. By "fun" I mean "nightmarish" and by "little" I mean "countless hours of headaches".
Let's network a Pico-8 cart.
This operation involves careful controlled management of the game state and manipulating the player controls with a wrapper. If we're using an HTML5 build, we can already manipulate the player inputs with JavaScript trivially enough -- there's an API explicitly for that one purpose. It also doesn't sound too hard to pause the game whenever controls haven't been received, although keeping a frame-perfect lockstep sync might be a hassle in itself.
But the BEST networking would involve allowing the local game to run a few frames ahead of the networked player and carefully revert and re-run those frames whenever changes in input are received, so that the game still runs full speed and remains synchronized with just a little bit of reality-bending when there's latency. This requires a deep, deep control over the entire game state, and the ability to run the game (without rendering) much faster than it's intended to go.
Fun.
Maybe I'll try it sometime. The license explicitly states I'm allowed to alter and use HTML5 cartridges for any purpose. If I can't hack around that, maybe I can make my own Pico-8 emulator that runs off of the .p8 text format files... although that seemingly falls into the legal grey area of the license a bit, since it would technically require fabricating a 16 color palette and sound waveforms similar enough that they could be considered a derivative work or some such, ... unless I read the same data out of a JavaScript file generated by the HTML5 exporter...? Gah.
That's enough rambling for now. This post is just a reminder for fun things to try whenever I'm bored next.
17 comments
IMO instead of single license checkbox, you should be able to select by mutliple checkboxes the kind of CC license you want for your game.
So, by default it'd be CC0, but then you could check each part of CC license, so you can have any combination of by nc sa nd.
1 comment
Sometimes, especially when working with animations, I prefer using GraphicsGale than Pico's internal editor. So I'd be glad if I could copy/paste sprites to/from standard image editing programs. As of how palette thing would work when pasting, if pixel is "unknown" (not in pico's palette), color with closest r/g/b values from palette would be used.
So e.g. if I have some pixels that are totally blue (#00FF00), when pasting those pixels will be changed to closest color in pico's palette which is 1 (I think) in this case.
Alternatively import/export of spritesheet from/to png file would be welcome, with same color conversion process when importing as when proposed pasting.
9 comments
Like explode() in PHP, nothing fancy, just taking a string and convert it into an array based on delimiter, so e.g. I can have following string: "303;12;18;6;23;45;10;66" and after doing:
array = explode("303;12;18;6;23;45;10;66",";")
|
Array will be {303,12,18,6,23,45,10,66}.
Reason is of course token space and I want to encode maps this way for my contra cart.
0 comments
I heard of Pico-8 on the Indie retro news blog, and loved the idea. I quickly purchased the "soft hardware" implementation, and I love it. What a great community, and what a great idea.
I love the restrictions ... except for one!
I feel that the cartridge limit is restrictive. I mean, I know it's "meant" to be restrictive, and I appreciate that it forces a certain kind of game - or at least a certain way of thinking about games - HOWEVER I also feel that the resolution and interface restrictions control the type of software developed beautifully.
With more "RAM" (or is it ROM if we're talking about a cartridge? Soft ROM :)?) we could see some amazing games with great depth catering to the display hardware restrictions.
If simply allowing any size cartridge is out of the question, what about considering several "categories", so we could have 64, 128, and 256k cartridge categories, for instance?
ps
None of this is any kind of negative or "I know better than thou". I love what you have created!
Cheers,
Rob
50 comments
I wrote a new tool that turns carts upside down.
% ./p8upsidedown jelpi.p8.png |
The tool is built with the picotool library (discussion). This version of the tool inverts the sprites, inverts the map, and translates the code to use inverted coordinates for drawing functions.
This is meant as a hack/demo and is known not to work with every cart. It works with many carts, and some of the failures are interesting. Notably:
-
The code translation increases the token count, so large carts (Celeste, Dusk Child) can't be turned upside down.
-
This version doesn't support spr/sspr calls that draw a rectangle of tiles. This wouldn't be too difficult to support: it'd need to flip the entire spritesheet not just individual sprites, translate the sprite IDs in the map, and extend the code to rewrite sprite ID args. But I have other things to do this weekend. :)
-
The print function will always print left to right, so we compromise and merely relocate the y coordinate for print / cursor calls. There's nothing the tool can do with carts that call multiple coordinate-less prints.
- I wrote this to exercise and demonstrate the picotool libraries for mutating Lua code via the AST. The lib doesn't know how to write out an arbitrary AST and preserve other comments/spaces, so p8upsidedown generates hideous code. Unfortunately the luafmt writer isn't entirely up to snuff either so it's not much help. This is mostly not an issue to Pico-8, though I did find a bug where Pico-8's special "t += val" syntax rejects a newline between the "+=" and the "val", which p8upsidedown might accidentally introduce.
Anyway, a fun weekend hack with picotool. Enjoy!
-- Dan
4 comments
(old tag: 16090)
I thought I wanted to make a game about launching missiles, but then I thought about it some more. All I really wanted was to make a game about moving an unwieldy cursor over a radar screen and pressing a button to do something.
So here we have SUPPLYDROP, in which you control a crosshair over a busy radar screen. Distant and imperilled groups of people have pooled their scant resources to send a distress signal, in the hope of reaching you and calling down desperately-needed supplies. You can help them, but their signals are terribly brief. Moreover, you only have ten supply drops to use. One supply drop can feed many people, but do you want to hold it back, in hopes of two beacons near each other? Or will you respond immediately to each call?
Watch for the signal beacons (orange squares). Move the crosshair with the arrow keys and use Z to place supplies near or on them to help those people. At the end of the game, you'll see your score and how many groups you saved. Any groups you missed will lower your score.
(Press Z on the score screen to restart.)
I had a lot of fun making this one over the last few days. I hope you enjoy playing it!
5 comments
I would like to learn how to reproduce the famous sinus scroller text effect, but i can't make it to work.
Can someone explain the idea behind this ? I don't want the code (i want to find it myself), i just want to understand how to approach this.
I've created a table with a cell for each letter of my text, now i need to print and move each later to the left in a sinus pattern, but i can't figured out :
cls()
table={1,2,3,4,5,6}
x=127
function _update()
end
function _draw()
for i=1,6 do
print(table[i],127-i*10,cos(i*3/12)*20+60)
end
end
|
With this i have a sinus with my text, but it's not moving in real time, and it's in reverse mode. At some point i need to erase each letter from their previous position ? How to erase only one printed letter ? Print the same letter at the same position with transparent color ? Maybe sprite are better for this because they are easiest to move ?
5 comments
Extremely limited (hacked-together) work in progress:
Explore a room!
Listen to some (unfinished) music!
Feast your eyes on a colour! (two, if you count black)
(the piano was playable - two chords - but i've switched it off so the music plays through)
8 comments
I had thirty bucks to blow, so I got a Game Gear (No picture, due to my phone sucking).
I know this is unrelated to PICO-8, but this thing is amazing!
Came with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which is a BLAST (see what I did there?).
Sorry to waste your time, I just wanted to tell you guys.
1 comment
