Hi PICO-8 community! My name is Jay and I've been a PICO-8 fan for a long time and I wanted to gauge interest in a book I'm writing. The book takes you through the journey of creating a whole game using PICO-8. I start you from scratch and not only shows you the code, but I walk you through it with explanations and pictures. I also discuss design, game development process, offer insights and take you through the journey of making a game. I've attached a 3 page excerpt from my book so far and wanted to get thoughts from everyone. My goal is to teach you to make a game by walking you through one. I hope to give you an appreciation for game creation and in the process you learn something about design, art and code.
A year ago I wanted to clone one of my favorite arcade games Defender. Except that I had the idea of documenting what I did the whole time. It took a while but I have a stack of notes of not only the creation of it, but the design exercises of why things are they way they are and justifying the order of each feature. After I finished, I realized that I could write a book that walks you through the whole thing. I've written 5 chapters so far and I'm estimating how much work it would be to finish and thinking about if anyone would find it useful or interesting.
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I am undertaking a project to port Super Mario Bros to the PICO-8! (Yes, I know a few people have tried to do this before, but this one is mine, so I want to make it extra special, and extra accurate.)
So far, I've gotten the level renderer to work (almost! missing a few items and functionalities, but the general idea is here). It takes hex data just like you'd see in the original game, and renders it exactly like the game would. I give an example of World 1-1 here, but I've tested this with the entirety of the first two worlds and a few of the bonus areas. If anyone has any questions about this project, please let me know!
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A quick implementation of the 10 times tic tac toe! Arrows select the grid, Z to place a piece. Player 1 and player 2 alternate.
Missing stuff:
- You always start from the middle game
- Nothing happens if you win/lose the game
- There is no real enforcement of the rules, apart from the "you can only play in this grid".
Rules (from boardgamegeek):
Each cell of the 3x3 grid of the master-game is broken into a 3x3 grid for a mini-game of Tic-Tac-Toe. You play each mini-game of Tic-Tac-Toe normally to try and win that cell in the Master grid.
There is a twist to normal Tic-Tac-Toe play however. The first player can place their piece in any of the 91 min-board squares on the board. After that each player must move to the mini-game which their opponent sends them.
- So if the first player plays in the top right square of one of the 9 mini-games, then the opponent must play their move in the minigame in the top right Master cell. Subsequent play follows the same rule.
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While there is no true PCOPY() command yet for Pico-8, you can certainly simulate having 3-extra virtual pages that will cost you no tiles, no mapper, and even no array space - if you are content to use the resolution of 64x64. In this two new commands are introduced. PCOPY() which will copy a page number from 0 to 3 back to a different page number 0 to 3 where zero is the display page.
It uses MEMCPY() so it should be fast enough.
Changed to use PGET() as apparently memcpy() does not work incrementally.
Doing so you can create images on the other three pages and recall them anytime you want.
You plot pixels using the PST() command where the first argument is page # (0-3), then x-coordinate, then y-coordinate, then color.
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Some kind of terrain editor. Place blocks with LMB, delete them with RMB, and cycle between blocks with the mouse wheel.
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First game, simple space dodger. Happy to receive feedback on gameplay and implementation!
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It looks like the "counter" of tokens and characters only looks in the main .p8 file; I'm using an external editor and my main just pulls in the external files but the character count seems to only account for the contents of the main file.
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This was made for a college course. There are some known errors, probably a lot of unknown. I don't know if I would call it "complete," but it will still manage to kill some time!
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My character just moves... the concept was to have him break rides but the collisions are giving me trouble.
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As simple as the subject.
- Write a cart that uses btnp().
- Run the cart.
- Press and hold a button to see it repeats.
- Hit esc to stop the cart.
- Enter 'resume' to resume the cart.
- Press and hold a button and see if it fails.
(Either that or key repeat isn't supposed to be a thing with btnp() and it only works right after you resume.)
This code is sufficient to show it:
boops=0
function _update()
if btnp()!=0 then
boops+=1
print("boop #"..boops)
end
end
|
Note: tested on win64 version.
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I've invested some time working on a demake for one of my favourite games from the 8-bit era, Deflektor (by Costa Panayi). Your goal is to guide a laser to the receiver on each of the levels, access to it is blocked until you destroy all pods on the level. Laser overloads when it hits mines or if the emitter gets feedback.
HOW TO PLAY (you can go through this tutorial in the game itself)
CHANGELOG V0.5.5
- 1 MORE LEVEL (now totalling 8)
CHANGELOG V0.5.4
- 1 MORE LEVELS (now totalling 7)
CHANGELOG V0.5.3
- 2 MORE LEVELS (now totalling 6)
- ADDED safety pre-check so levels don't start on full-reflection or overload status
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With the launch of PICOWARE, I got many reports from player saying they got a "communication error" when trying to play the minigames. This error was a fail-safe mechanism intended to avoid a situation, wherein someone tries to start a minigame cart in any other way than from the main cart.
The implementation is: on main cart load, zero out the "difficulty" save data. On subcart load, set the difficulty — it's guaranteed to be in range 1..15. In subcart, check if saved difficulty is 0 — if yes, stop the cart and display a message about a communication error.
Subcarts decide what mode/difficulty/minigame will be used based on the data received from the main cart, and so this is to enforce starting from the main cart. Furthermore, after a whole playthrough, subcarts are supposed to return to the main cart and inform it of the score. Can't imagine a situation when the player starts a minigame in a "single minigame" mode, then the subcart starts the whole story mode, and after finishing returns to the story cart which informs the player that they beat the whole stage.
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