My entry for the Weekly Hour Game Jam, week 1 2017. The theme was "Happy New Year", so I created a fireworks show. To add a bit of interactivity, you can move a cursor around and draw shapes with X or Y to create different firework effects.
I definitely still had a few things on my TODO list after an hour, so it's missing some polish, but overall I'm happy with what I finished in 60 minutes.
Hi everyone, I'm glad to join PICO-8's community!
I heard about the "fantasy console" for the first time when I became aware of the newest Humble Bundle. Just the idea of a tiny virtual machine on which is possible to create little softwares to play on the same system on which they have been made amazed me. It could make no sense being already limited in game development, but it perfectly agrees with the meaning of "vintage" and "retro".
I come from a childhood during which I used to play many old games through emulators, but I also had the chance to buy a real NES (..obviously my favourite console)! I have been able to study what makes games enjoyable to play thank to my passion for game development, in fact I started learning coding and game design by himself at early age. I did not have many experiences with different programming languages or game engines: I started with GameMaker and kept growing my knowledge in using that great tool.
During 2016 I founded Credici, a development team with which I'm developing a PC game dated to be released at the end of spring. I would like to continue talking about Credici and our game but I feel it would be inappropriate "making advertising" on this forum.
Here are my questions:
- How PICO-8 born? (I didn't find much surfing the net..)
- What "BBS" stands for?
- When you find someone to have a collaboration with, how do you work on the same cartridge at the same time? or how do you merge your jobs?
Thank you in advance for the answers!
I hope to feel comfortable in this community and to have good relations with you other :)



For my first PICO-8 project I decided to make a game similar to Pac-Man Battle Royale, my favorite multiplayer arcade game of the decade. Right now you can play 1-player with an AI opponent, or 2-player battle.
The basic pac-man gameplay is there, but so far the only mechanic I've implemented is players bumping off each other on collision. I still need to add a lot more gameplay and flair, and hopefully find some ways to make it my own (besides the greek labyrinth theme). This is my first PICO-8 project, I'd welcome any feedback!
This is Squashy Ball, based off of the tutorial in Picozine #1. As a fun project I decided to enhance the game and make it more enjoyable and less buggy. This is my first try at coding something in this language and I have very little experience coding at all. Any feedback on the game is very welcome! Also any feedback on how to make my code more efficient/better would be good too. Thanks!
In the menu's, press X to go to the selected item, and Z to go back to the main menu. You can press left and right to choose your skin in the options menu, but I haven't worked out changing the difficulty yet so that is not available. For reference, I think the way the game is now would probably be Hard mode, as it is quite difficult.
One thing I would specifically like to ask is: how can I get rid of the trail that appears behind the ball? Specifically with the Christmas skin it is very noticeable, and I would like this to look nicer.
Demo Controls:
Position the pointer in one of the 4 quarters using the arrow keys to change the music.
The music will change depending on which quarter you're in. The check marks in these quarters show which channels are enabled for each quarter.
The changes will go into effect as soon as the pattern ended.
Background Story:
I came up with the idea of having the music chance depending on where you are while still keeping the same song. I quickly ran into an issue. I realized that there was no way to make this happen using just the "music" function.
Later that day I found out about the "peek" and "poke" functions: allowing you to directly read and write to ram. I found out where to find the music pattern section and started mapping it out to get more control over it.
[b]Music in RAM: