This is my submission for the Pico-8 2025 Advent Calendar.
Read Santa's useful signs for information on your moveset and make it to the present hoard to truly become an elf worker!

Use your unique abilities as an elf to reach the goal!

Credits

Game by @Eriond
Music by @Gruber

Changelog

Update 1.1

• Fixed some minor bugs and code
• Can now roll while moving

Also, check out the other games by my fellow elves! It has been so much fun being able to participate in this years advent calendar!

platformer christmas advent-calendar

Hi, this is a Christmas twist on snake. Collect light bulbs to wrap them around a tree, a reindeer, or an elf. A bulb can be worth 1, 2, or 3 segments at random. Each time you drop off the lights, you must get a longer snake the next time!

This is my first game jam. I had a ton of fun and everyone was super nice. Thanks to everyone for all the feedback and play testing. Also special thanks to my son for help with the artwork!

advent calendar 2025

Just starting out with Picotron and trying out some terrain rendering by following a tutorial by Gustavo Pezzi (https://youtu.be/bQBY9BM9g_Y)

The base is under attack! Wave after wave of space squids doom the space settlement. It's up to you and your trusty zapper to fend them off for as long as you can. You're the hero in Some People Call Him the Space Cowboy! Keep your phaser charged and your shield online--those squids just keep coming.

back story

I love doodling sprites in Pico-8 and seeing what comes of them. This game started with a cowboy, who became (with a nod to Steve Miller) the Space Cowboy. It was my first attempt at a shoot-em-up. What you see here represents a total redo of the code, after I learned tons from Lazy Devs Academy. There's still a lot I'd like to do with this someday, but perfect is the enemy of good, as they say.

arcade shmup family-friendly

legally this is a sequel to Dust Settlers, a game i made around a year ago, but the gameplay is pretty different! weirdly this was inspired by the same thread of ideas that led to Lil Kobold's Big Stew, but yea just went to a very different place. In SUPER Dust Settlers, you terraform a planet .... by collecting resource cards. It's almost a city builder, but there's a very very light ecological sim that pushes things around some...

UPDATE: redesigned some of the training missions and rewrote some of the mission prompts. No changes to the main game mode or ecology mechanics. Hopefully made some of the core concepts easier to pick up without spoiling the fun of figuring out how the ecology works!

Controls

Move Character around with D-Pad or Arrow Keys
Z: Reset Levels
X: Rotate Mirror or Laser

Rules

Objects that move (can be pushed) are usually outlined in a dark blue color (including lasers, and crystals)
The object rotated is adjacent in the player and the player is looking at the object is rotates
Player looks in the direction it last moved
Lasers can be pointed in 8 different directions e.g. up, up-right, right, down-right, etc
A floor switch only activates when the corresponding block is placed on it.
A floor switch will either active lasers or open a gate
Shooting a laser at a crystal will activate a gate

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puzzle

Santaban

Santa is busy delivering presents, when he reached a big building. The ducting is a mess. Help Santa move the present to their correct locations!

Controls

Arrow keys: Move
O: Undo
Enter: Open menu

Advent calendar

This cart is part of the 2025 advent calendar. This is the logo sprite (thanks @Doriencey)

	[16x16]

puzzle christmas

Pico Poker All-Stars is a tiny Poker Rogue-like. PPA is also a love letter to pico-8 and all of the fantastic developers and people (ME) who are trying to learn and become game developers.

I created custom Joker cards themed from classic PICO-8 games, using popular games characters like One Boss, Birds With Guns, Buns, Dusk Child, Invader Overlord, Porklike, Oblivion Eve, Ascent, The Lair, and a personal favorite of mine Zip Zapper. Penny the Pumpkin, Jilpi, and Madeline (Celeste) are Face Cards.

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cards poker jelpi celeste roguelike

Hey Lexaloffle folks 👋

I’ve been living in the PICO-8 terminal like it owes me money, and I finally have something I’m excited (and slightly sleep-deprived) to share:

DOTZI ZOMBIES 3D — a pseudo-3D, raycasted wave survival cart where you’re boarding up windows, earning cash, and trying not to become floor decoration.

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fps zombies

Howdy! I was wondering if anyone knows how I block inputs in-between game modes. For example, if I have the player press X to start the game, that same x press activates the player actions as the game begins. I've had this problem in two games, now, and just can't seem to fix it. I even try wrapping the btnp triggers in IF statements checking for one of the two states. Still blows right through to the second game state.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

wip new help

Rent-a-Car Dash V 1.1 (updated!)

A real-time management simulator of a car rental agency!

• Manage you employees from 9:00 to 19:00 every day and ensure all cars are ready to be rented

• Balance your times and take the best decisions to avoid losing clients or losing car returns

• Deliver the kind of car every client wants, on the right time

• Every car should be clean and with a tank full of gas to be ready to deliver

• Play through days and seasons to improve your stats and win money

UPDATE: V1.1 includes:

• Two-layered cursor algorithm to improve selection dynamics
• More balanced cars and client spawn logic (to guarantee car availability and less dependence on "luck")

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real time management dinner dash strategy simulator casual rts

Work in progress for a somewhat robust dialog / textbox system.

TODO:

• Queuing
• Line max-length
• Word colors/effects.

Also, working on figuring out why it starts typing on cart launch instead of waiting for X.

oop dialog dialogue textbox typewriter animation metatable

This was a game I made in about 1 day, I am a young programer, so dont judge the code please.

CONTROLS:
left right up down = move
x and o = select

HOW TO PLAY:

you are a astronaut that gets a radio call from another planet, they ask you to help them and you agree. asteroid dust gets pulled toward the player, because you have a gravity orb. you goal is to get 110 asteroid dust particles so you can destroy the attackers... or are they.

story space fun action

PI GOES NORTH

Survival/Roguelike/Advent2025

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Alone in the northern wastes of the world

Lost and alone in the winter wilderness, will Pi be able to survive the elements and return to the north pole?

Forage,Craft and Learn to survive as you treck your way through an icy wasteland towards your home with only a trusty lantern.

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Credits:

• Programming art and sound all by SailorJelli
• My amazing girlfriend Eve who is a far better writer than I and composed the poem as well as named the game.
• My good friend Nora who came up with more custom death messages than I can count when my brain was drawing a blank.
• A massive thankyou to all my fellow elves in the 2025 Advent-Callendar Jam for without their advice and testing this game would be a shadow of what it is today.

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** This game was made as part of the 2025 Advent Callendar Jam, please check out the full callendar and all the wonderful games of my fellow elves

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survival puzzle roguelike winter advent2025 crafting

yup, this is my CHIP8 emulator made in PicoTron
to change the cycles, press [+] or [-]
support for SCHIP and XO-CHIP will be added soon, if possible (._. `)

chip8 emulator emulation

In the music pattern editor, using Shift+Space to resume playback from a non-zero row (e.g., row 20) correctly starts audio from that row, but pattern chaining/advance does not honor the resumed position. The next pattern doesn’t begin when the resumed pattern reaches its end; instead, it begins only after the full duration of the pattern elapses as if playback had started from row 0. The “extra wait” depends on how late into the pattern playback was resumed.

This behavior also occurs when resuming via code using music() with a non-zero tick_offset (e.g., music(pattern, nil, nil, base_addr, tick_offset)): playback starts at the requested tick offset, but the transition to the next pattern appears scheduled as if started from tick 0.

Expected: Resuming from a row/tick should also shift the pattern-end timing so the next pattern begins at the correct time relative to the resumed position.

Actual: Playback cursor jumps, but pattern-advance timing behaves as if playback began from the start of the pattern.

Lil Science project game.

Simulate generations of a family in just minutes, a see a family tree of your created family.

Controls

• Arrow keys for most functions and getting around.
• Use X button to select a person.

How to Play

• The goal of the game is to make an individual with a certain trait under ten generations.
• If you select a child of two people that matches the goal person you win.
• The children created are a combination of the two people selected.
• The traits follow the real world laws of genetics.

It does not matter if the person your trying to make is male or female!

If the goal person has a pink shirt and the person you pick has a blue shirt, if they have the same phenotype with their genes it still counts as winning

Alleles:

There are 4 traits in this game which are controlled by five different genes.

Hopefully you already have heard of these or else it might be pretty confusing.

• A: controls hair color, follow normal Mendel principles where brown is dominant over blond (In the pedigree brown is autosomal dominant, blond autosomal recessive).

• B: controls height, follows co-dominance where tall and short are co-dominant(I just made tall big letters and short small letters because its easy and matches others, I know that they are supposed to be different).

• C: controls skin color, follows incomplete dominance where green is incompletely dominant over purple.

• I/J: controls eye color, follows multiple alleles. If a dominant I allele is present, the eye color will be brown. otherwise the J allele decides eye color in which case green is dominant over blue with normal mendelian principles.

Other Info

Carriers with one dominant and one recessive allele won't show up on the pedigree at the end but you can tell from the genotype.

I also did not include sex recessive traits (traits that are carried on the X chromosome) or the generations numbers for the pedigrees for space reasons but just know I didn't forget.

this is the first game I made, I followed a tutorial and added some cool things I learned along the way from other tuts.