I'm literally just learning to code as I've never done it before, but a friend put me on to Pico 8. I wanted to make a tiny underground train game. Can't decide what the point of it should be. But here's the map.
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The first PICO-8 Jam is approaching!
Following on from this thread, here's an invite cart to make it legit:
Duration: The Jam will take place from 00:00 PST on the 21st of November 2015 and will finish at 24:00 PST on the 29th. So, it spans 2 weekends and 5 weekdays. You can spend as much or little time on your carts as you like. Tiny silly cartridges are more than welcome.
Theme: As is customary with other jams, a theme will be posted at the start and the goal is simply to make a cart (or some carts) during the jam that reflect your interpretation of the theme. Any type of cartridge is ok: games, toys, demos, music carts or pixels.
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The console is amazing and I'm loving making stuff in it but, to be honest, the in-console editors suck sometimes. Especially the code editor. And sometimes I'd really like to be editing the graphics and music in a more robust program.
One fairly simple feature that would help a lot is auto-reload when a cartridge changes. I pretty much always have a cartridge open in both a text editor, to write Lua code, and in Pico, to test changes. The text editor reloads automatically and that's awesome, but I have to manually reload the cartridge in Pico whenever I make changes to the code. And not only is it tedious, but I'm also prone to forgetting and making and saving some change in Pico, thereby overwriting the data that had been previously saved by the text editor.
In the same vein of making it easier to write code in an external program: Please don't lower-case all my code. It might not matter in Pico's text editor but it does when viewed in an external program.
An alternate cartridge format could help with using external editors, especially for sprite and audio data. A cartridge could be represented by a directory containing one Lua file, an image file containing the sprite data, a data file (perhaps in TMX format, that looks fairly popular?) for map data, another data file for sprite flags, more data files for sound effects and music, hopefully in a standard format. It might get dodgy with the way data can be shared across sprites and maps, for example, but I'm sure there's a way to make it work.
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Hi everyone,
Just started using PICO-8, this is my first code experiment. I like making things generate weird pictures.
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I've been using the Pico-8 for a while now, since it's pretty much everything I've ever wanted in a "fantasy console", and I would have made one almost exactly like it (albeit with a larger palette and looser limits, perhaps...) if and when designing and programming one myself. So to skip that entire process and jump straight into making nifty little widgets and toys for this device... Well it's been quite a dream come true!
That said, Pico-8 is far from being without issues, and more keep cropping up the more I play with it. So, outside of bug reports, here's a small laundry list of things I "want", or would be nice to have at some point...
Note: This is a blog post, an off-the-cuff rattling of random things I personally would desire. I'm not expecting it to be directly acted on or hotly debated or anything like that, this just keeps track of what I want so I don't forget, you know?
- The ability to call non-system functions without arguments in the same way as system functions, eg. as "run" instead of "run()". Maybe before trying to process the input as a Lua script, it should try to see if there's a global variable by that name first, and if that variable is a function, call it?! There's no reason to make such a distinction in most cases.
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So, today I made a Pico-8 paint program... in Pico-8.
You might be wondering why I would do such a thing, since the Pico-8 development platform comes with a built-in paint program that's almost exactly the same, except it can use the mouse instead of clunky keyboard controls. The simple answer is... This is the beginning of what might be the biggest thing I'm likely to do on the Pico-8. Ever.
Imagine a Pico-8 game shared by a Dropbox folder or similar system, where every user gets their own character and their own room, and every object in the game world was uniquely painted up by users, held, given, and placed in those rooms to furnish them with things, and all of it was maintained by a slow, asynchronous system of a multitude of carts, set up in such a way that multiple copies of the game being run by tens of players should never cause data collisions.
Welcome to Pico Hotel, an oldschool collaborative world-building and interaction experience.
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On this quiet and endless night, the TETRATON will unleash its potential and attempt to survive this technological challenge where it has to change its weapon module the biggest number of times while being attacked by enemy ships!! WILL THE TETRATON MAKE IT TO THE END?!?!
No it will not. The night is endless.
A shooter inspired from LUFTRAUSERS and Super Crate Box.
'z' and 'x' rotates the TETRATON.
Directional buttons shoot (and propel) in involved direction.
Get to crate ball to change weapon and get a point.
[b]16 different weapons.
Double parallax.
Lots of bullets.
Quick deaths.
Quick retries.
Palette randomization.
Not very good soundtrack but hey I tried.
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Added proper ball physics and it now feels more realistic and the balls don't go crazy (as often, still they get stuck together sometimes). I also added a selection for french billiard bands, with no bands or 3 bands mode. That's five modes total!
A little improvement over the physics, revamped the graphics, added a line between the crosshairs and the white ball. And
we now have title screen music.
Now, we have one or two players french billiard mode too, and you can choose from the start screen. Still got bugs to clean up, specially regarding to the balls physics. Hope you enjoy.
My first PICO-8 cartridge and game. A small snooker game, choose the force and direction with the cross, the farther, the stronger the hit, and the direction will be from the cross to the white ball, always.
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You people are amazing.
I'm sitting here proud of the fact that I got scrolling working in a game, or collision detection working properly, and I see these wonderful "technical advancements" and games that are so awesome that you all can seem to just make effortlessly. I'm jealous, honestly. I wish that someday I will be able to achieve the things you people do. You are awesome.
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You know how in "Kong" they called Mario "JumpMan" because he jumped over things? Well I call this little guy "RunMan" because... Well, you'll see!
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(Warning: It takes more effort to lose than it does to "win" endlessly.)
This is a little something I threw together specifically to make into a microgame for the PicoWare collab project
I may have gotten a little carried away with the music, it's way more awesome than the gameplay at this point...
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Controls:
Arrows to move
Z to shoot forward.
X to shoot backward.
Notes:
- Kinda WIP. It's got a bit of playability, I guess.
- Music sucks. Can a composer help me?
- Not sure how faithful to the source material I want to be.
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Here's a funny little collaboration project that I'm afraid only works offline by nature. I've set up a system to pass data back and forth between carts for a "WarioWare Inc."-style micro-game system.
If you have Pico-8 installed, you can download the current API / project and microgames from here: picoware-inc_2015-11-19_2.zip
You're all set to play and/or make your own microgames, microgame loaders, etc. Have fun!
Starter pack microgame list:
- Jelpi by Zep
- ennuigi by joshmillard
- Simon Says by Connorses
- pick the nose booger by Connorses
- Tech Exercise by Connorses based on Graphics Exercise by Mason
- Puzzlecave - Raiders Of The Lost Potato by hackefuffel
- Endless Train by le_gars
Currently missing features:
- "Skill" ramping. The microgames never get harder, only faster.
- The interface is entirely barebones right now. It could use some art assets, fuller music, etc.
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3D week? I think we're skipping a big technological step going straight to filled and dithered polygons...
I made a triangle out of lasers, I guess.
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Well, it's a 3D kinda week on the pico8.
This is a demo of an SNES-style mode-7 engine that renders a perspective view of the map, like the old Final Fantasy games.
Right now, drawing the map is using about 70% of the CPU cycle, so it could definitely use some optimization to leave space for other things like billboard sprites and the like. Reach goal would be to add MIP mapping so that closer scenery would have more detail and further away scenery would be less prone to sparkle.
-Electric Gryphon
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i don't really want to work on this anymore
let me know if you like what i was getting at
feel welcome to hacking it up and putting something together yourself, the game engine is relatively complete
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