It's been a while since I've created anything for PICO-8. Rest assured I have something big planned, and in preparation of that, I thought I'd make a table-to-string serializer and string-to-table deserializer.
"Didn't you already do that?" Yes, I did - I called the decoder and encoder tablefy() and untablefy() - but there are two things I wanted to improve about the format: the editability of the encoded strings, and the compressed-size impact. And I've come up with a solid improvement, inspired by the TOON format.
JWON (Josiah Winslow's Object Notation) is a data format made for use in PICO-8. Its purpose is to save tokens on large literal tables, while having them remain easy to edit in the devkit editor itself.
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SpaceCat featured this on their YouTube channel so I figured I make it public: Taco Wars!
It's a silly little first person dogfighting game where you shoot at taco's, with lasers! Hope you enjoy it, this is my first published Pico-8 game.
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Run this cart to copy a sprite representing the default color table to your clipboard, which can be pasted into the gfx editor.
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Hello,
I am a teacher in Germany and I want to show my students game development using the pico 8 edu version: https://www.pico-8-edu.com/
Unfortunately it is not possible to type curly or square brackets in the edu version with german keyboards. (It works fine in the normal windows app.)
When I try to type { (alt+7) it will say "captured label image".
When I try to type [ (alt+8) it will say "set video starting point".
I tried using different keyboards and computers but it did not work.
I think this is a critical bug because this way the EDU version is not usable for Germans.
Kind regards
Daniel
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Medieval Survivor
Endure 10 minutes of relentless chaos.
Defeat the final boss.
Claim your victory!
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Controls
The controls for the game are:
The arrow keys are for movement
X for clockwise rotation around the board
Z/O for anticlockwise rotation around the board
Rules
You are in a desert and discover a pyramid. Wanting to enjoy the view from the top, you decide to climb it. However, there’s a problem: the people at the top are trying to stop you by throwing barrels down at you.
Can you reach the top without being knocked off?
- Lose 5 points every second
- Lose 20 points each time a barrel hits you
Behind the Scenes
This was the second game I developed under my fictional game studio, Lantern Tiger Games.
The main issue I encountered during development was getting the barrels to either despawn properly or stop changing direction whenever the player switched sides.
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A long time ago(last summer), my partner and I decided to join a miniJam for fun. We ended up making a game called MicroSino.
If you look at my older posts, I had been working on a graphics trick to make the screen 64 by 64 and add collision for objects that are 4x4 pixels in size.
I eventually figured out how to get it to work and use that as a base for this project.
I'm pretty happy with the project; it was one of the last things I did before burning out hard and it gives me hope I can still get back to that level of output.
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Been trying Picotron on windows and wanna use it on my Raspberry Pi 3. I have the default Raspberry OS installed which can run Linux commands, but I’m a bit of a Linux noob. Can anyone help me run the Picotron Rasp. Pi version with maybe an executable?
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I use Windows 11 on my tiny laptop and it defaults to 150% scaling. The manual says:
"-pixel_perfect n 1 for unfiltered screen stretching at integer scales (on by default)"
When I launch Pico-8, it is not integer scaled when I enter full screen.
I'm able to work around this by launching Pico-8 through cmd, eg: pico8.exe -pixel_perfect 1 -windowed 0 -splore. When I change the Windows 11 scaling to 100% it works correctly but then I can't see anything on my laptop.
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its just a screensaver i made in the early hours of the morning, enjoy!
to install, execute:
load #wasdly_flying_floppies save /appdata/system/screensavers/floppies.p64 |
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Master your jumps and befriend your momentum...
Controls
Press Left and Right to run. Press Circle to long jump. Press Cross to high jump.
Gameplay
In Beacon Race you race against the clock to collect as many beacons as you can before time runs out. Collecting a beacon adds fifteen seconds to your timer. If you are confident with your skills, you can also collect time bonuses from their tricky hiding spots for a massive thirty second bonus. Once the time runs out, it is game over.
On normal difficulty, you start from collecting only beacons near you at easy locations. You will be asked to collect beacons further away and harder to reach after you have collected more beacons. On hard difficulty however, even your very first beacon can be a far and difficult one.
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You are a ghost!
Which is pretty difficult when you're afraid of everything.
Most nights in the graveyard are peaceful. However tonight you have a lot of uninvited guests who just won't leave you alone! Getting rid of a load of ghost-hunting teenagers might be tough, but with your sneaking skills (and perhaps a little help) you just might be able to manage it… after you overcome your fear of the dark!
How to play
🚶 Movement: Arrow keys
🗣️ Talk/interact: Z or X button
😱 Scare: X button (must be unlocked)
🫥 Hide: Z button (must be unlocked)
More details
I made this game a few years ago; you may have seen GIFs floating around. I don't have time to finish the full version right now so I've decided to put the Pico-8 prototype up on the BBS for folks to enjoy.
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My first project in Picotron. I wanted to make a pretty wallpaper limited to the default palette and challenged myself to make it interactive and test Picotrons limits.
Updates:
sakura-4
- Optimized the drawing functions and staggered the updates to lower CPU usage to ~33% :3
- Forgot to comment out the copies in main
Info:
Dynamic Wallpaper with Procedural Wind Effect
(Uses between 40% and 30% CPU)
Reacts to Cursor Movement
Preview:
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NEW GAME RAHHHH
Yep! After like a solid 3 weeks of on off coding i finally got Skyrrow 2 finished.
for comparison to the first one which was basically a test of my skills.
Skyrrow 1:
- Base game
- Some post-release bug fixes
- text based screens
- empty sky
Skyrrow 2:
- Base game
- hopefully no post-release bugfixes
- BGM in all areas of the game
- custom made Main menu, Win & lose screens
- actual objective
- multicolored arrow
- birdies :D
Thats it all
Im not sure where to go with PICO now, but if i ever make a Skyrrow 3 or another type of game on the Pico 8 engine, ill be sure to upload it here!
Enjoy!
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Hi. I've been working on a racing game (link) with multiple race courses. Each course fills the 128x64 tile map and are stored as strings. For reference, the courses all look similar to this (ignore the black dots):
So far it includes 3 courses out of 5 planned, however I'm starting to come up on the compressed capacity limit at 91%. It looks like the map strings take up about 10% each (~3000 chars). Experimenting with minification using Shrinko8 says I could save maybe ~20% when not counting map strings. This would give me enough space for two more courses, but I want to avoid minification if possible. I think my best bet is to improve map compression.
Currently the maps are stored as a list of pairs of bytes, where the first is the tile id and the second is the 'length'. Does anyone have any good techniques/methods for more aggressive map compression? If it helps, the maps have a limited palette of only 16 tiles (or even just 8 if absolutely necessary).
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