Peak of Souls is the world's tiniest souls-like game, heavily inspired by the likes of Dark Souls.
Navigate four different levels, gather souls from your fallen enemies, and unlock access to 4 unique bosses, in order to ascend the Peak of Souls, and gain immortality.
01 - Ashen Fields
02 - Woods of Sorrow
03 - Castle Dread
04 - Frozen Ascent
In true souls-like fashion, you can rest at a torch to restore your health and healing charges. This torch will then serve as your respawn point when you die, however, resting will also respawn all normal enemies in the map.
0 comments
Hey y'all! Zeta here with my first PICO-8 cartridge. My main platform is NES, so it was fun to try on a new set of constraints and see what I could do with them. Without further ado:
Boba
A short platforming adventure played with just one button! Master the singular control to hop your way through three distinct areas, with a variety of upgrades. Can you find all 15 coins and reach the summit?
Control
D-Pad, O, X: Press the Button
Basic Actions
Press: Begin moving in the direction you are facing
Release: Jump into the air!
Using Items
Hook: Activates automatically when you jump into a ledge.
Speed Shoes: Press the button just as you land for a burst of speed.
18 comments
This is a simple filter that gradually reduces the saturation applying a black and white effect to the Picotron palette
0 comments
Welcome to Speranza, Raider!
Head out, roll your dice and loot to your heart's content! This is our PICO-8 version of ARC Raiders. It has been reimagined as an auto-battler, featuring dice rolling for combat and looting, as well as a strong focus on inventory management. Collect loot to craft or purchase superior weapons, and eventually stand your ground against a Queen or Matriarch. Collect special loot along the way to earn permanent perks and make your runs easier and more successful. You can choose between short, medium and long runs: quick and safe rounds or a longer and riskier stay for better loot.
Idea, concept and music by Herr Kaschke
4 comments
The very basic piano!
My first upload and my first attempt at making a pico cart including sound. It is a very basic piano that show which note with both a simple piano and a simple score.
Hopefully I will be able to make it more fun and enjoyable in the future :D.
0 comments
.png)
Your warp drive thrusts you into the battlefield. Already, you're in a race against time - your enemy is still and silent, but not for long. It's a matter of seconds before you hear that terrible scream. You need to act quickly.
In this reimagining of 1983's Sinistar, you stand alone against a vast and viscous automated weapon. Your foe is quick and brutal - and only getting quicker with each encounter. Pile your resources high, and master the art of space dogfighting, and you might just stand a chance against... the Malistar.
Know Your Enemy
As you begin each mission, the Malistar is still inactive. Use this time to bolster your defences and gather bombs - your blasters alone have no chance of damaging so strong a foe.
5 comments
Updates in revision 2:
- Safe reset for internal game timer
- Opening door takes priority over picking up weapons
Dark Streets
Take down an evil corporation and its megalomaniac CEO!
Features four levels, eight weapons, sixteen enemy types, multi-floor graphics, and four endings!
Warning
The game is dark and intended to have a gloomy atmosphere. A secret enemy is designed to look repulsive. There are no intentional jumpscares.
Controls
Keyboard recommended.
Adjust turn/mouse sensitivity in the pause menu.
Tractorist (keyboard only)
Arrow keys: move and turn
Z or C: press to interact, hold to strafe and run
X or V: hold to fire
19 comments
ZpacepillZ is a fast paced arcade game about collecting pillz and slamming into Zpace ghosts all with the aim of getting as high a score as possible.
Controls:
Z - switch movement directions
X - turn inwards and slam across space to collect pillz and smash zpace ghosts
Playtime:
Depends how high you want your score to go
Enjoy!
Development story:
ZpacepillZ is my first pico8 project and I'm really happy with how it has all worked out. I set out to make something simple and fun to play and found a two button game design that I was able to really focus on juicing up as much as possible given my early knowledge of the engine.
8 comments
My first mini game project. Still a work in progress. Thanks for playing and checking it out!
0 comments
Branch Line Ltd. - A Tiny 18xx-Inspired Train Game
Branch Line Ltd. is a small solo economic train game about building railroads, buying shares, and trying not to make your rivals rich by accident.
The pitch is pretty simple: what if you took some of the feelings I love from 18xx and cube rails games - shared incentives, awkward investments, train timing, and “wait, did I just help you more than myself?” - and compressed them into a short PICO-8 game with dice, bots, and a little bit of market chaos?
It is not trying to be a full 18xx game. There is no track map, no route tracing, no two-hour teach, and no spreadsheet required. It is more of a small economic toy box that borrows the emotional shape of those games: railroads become more valuable, trains and routes come from shared supplies, ownership matters, and the best move is not always the move that makes the company better.
Each round, you roll three dice. One die is used to choose a company and action. One die is used to operate a railroad if that action is selected. The third die is discarded. Actions let you buy shares, operate a railroad, or take a bonus when a share purchase is blocked.
There are six railroads and three investors: you, Reginald, and Xavier. Each railroad has a limited number of shares. You can hold up to five shares in one railroad and fifteen shares total, so your portfolio matters. If you are president or tied for president, bonuses pay especially well, but minority positions can still score if the company becomes valuable.
Railroads earn through route cards and train cards. Routes show stop values, and trains determine what the railroad can actually run. A 2-train can pay a 2-2 route, but it cannot handle longer routes. Bigger trains open up better routes, but in the advanced game they also come with higher maintenance costs.
The game ends after 18 rounds. Your final score is based on the value of the railroads in your portfolio: company revenue times the number of shares you own, plus any bonus money earned during the game. Highest score wins. Ties are possible, and honestly fairly appropriate.
The bots are intentionally different. Xavier is loose and chaotic. Reginald is sharper and more controlling. They are not meant to perfectly simulate human players, but they do create pressure. They buy into companies you care about, block things, chase value, and occasionally make you mutter at the screen.
There is also an advanced mode, which adds maintenance and a couple of once-per-game special actions. Maintenance makes big trains more expensive to hold, so there is more tension between growth and efficiency. Share swaps let you drop two shares from one railroad to gain one elsewhere. Train movement lets you reassign the largest train from one railroad to another. These are small additions, but they create some nasty little timing questions.
My general design goal was not to make the biggest possible train game in PICO-8. It was to make the smallest version that still felt like it had teeth.
I like games where the system is easy to understand but hard to fully control. I like when a move can be “good” and still feel dangerous. I like when the player has to ask whether they are building an engine for themselves or for someone else. Branch Line Ltd. is built around those ideas.
This is also very much a PICO-8 object. The limits are part of the design. The small screen, the tiny UI, the restricted space for rules, and the need to keep the whole thing readable pushed the game toward abstraction. Instead of drawing a big map, the railroads are represented by company state, route cards, train cards, shares, and history graphs. The drama is in the ownership and timing rather than the geography.
The result is a compact, slightly mean, solo train stock game that plays quickly but still gives you a few crunchy decisions to chew on.
Controls are shown on each screen. The PICO-8 menu includes rules, sound/music toggles, and a history screen with graphs for score, company revenue, and company trains.
Thanks for playing, and I hope you enjoy watching a tiny railroad empire become someone else’s profit machine.
0 comments
Callisto is a 2D Monster Hunter style game with metroidvania and action-platformer elements.
Controls
Slides consume stamina. Later when you get the appropriate upgrades, you can do an air dash and an underwater dash.
Gameplay
- Accept Quests from the Town NPC lady.
- When on an EXPLORE quest press pause, then choose "Return to Hub" to get back to the Hub Town.
While exploring you can traverse from world to world. Find the exits on each map and head to a new area! Hunt indefinitely until you choose to return to the hub (via the pause menu) - When on a monster hunt, find and defeat the monster to return to town. You can only faint 3 times before the quest will fail. If you wish to abandon the quest, choose Reset Cart from the pause menu. NOTE: Choosing "Reset Cart" will send you back to the hub town only if you are NOT in explore mode.
- If you try to leave the locale while on a hunt, you'll get a notification that you cannot do so. Come back to that exit while in explore mode.
- Buy items and craft gear at the shops in town!
- Use items in the pause menu (Herbs and Panacea)
- Swap between subweapons (Javelins and Bombs) in the pause menu
Use subweapons effectively! Not only are they useful combat items, but they can help you traverse the maps too.
Behind the Scenes
This is the first version release of Callisto! This game has been a prototype for a much larger and much more polished 16-bit version of the game that I am working on. It is a mash-up of a Metroidvania and Monster Hunter. This is a multicart Pico-8 game.
Credits
I created everything here except for the music. The pixel art is original by me, but I did take some inspiration from various sources for some of the icons. The music files are adapted from free music provided by Snabisch and Robby Duguay, thank you to both of them for their freely available assets. My current plans are to make a more in-depth version of this game in a different engine. It will have more resolution, more weapons, more characters, more locales, more monsters, more equipment, more upgrades, more everything!
10 comments
A simple game I made to test out tile-based movement and collisions. Use the arrow keys to move. Collecting the dollar signs grants you $20, and stepping on accidents makes you lose $25. Each movement costs $1. You lose when you reach $0 or less.
I think the way I did it is kind of shaky, so I'll probably work on another game that is similar but has a better structure for the tiles.
0 comments
First draft update----
-attack (x), attack2 (z), arrow keys for directionals.
-none of the names or titles are final, just placeholders, obviously this isn't a fishing game haha.
-3 characters (fast, normal, slow)
-3 enemy types (miniboss,boss1,boss2)
-Draft menus created
-I'm at 6k tokens right now...fingers crossed that I can finish everything with just 2k tokens.
-cpu usage hovering around 15-18%
-Intro music done
-lots more to do for SFX
-secondary attacks added but will need to make them unique between each playable char.
-boss secondary (ultimate) attack added but will also need adjusting.
Movement and enemy ai mechanics are pretty much done, but bullet sprites and movement logic will need updating. Feels way too static at the moment.
Coming into Pico-8, I didn't anticipate how super limited the sprite space is when creating the initial character sprites. Not exactly sure how I'm going to manage sprites for additional enemies and maps, but it's not worth it to go back and redo all the sprite stuff given that the only somewhat cool thing this game is the sprite animations and movement.
One thought is to create maybe four or so tiles and have those procedurally generate with certain variables randomized each time the game state is initialized, e.g., tile color, background/foreground particles. Handling the map this way would free up more space for enemy sprites.
The bigger question, though, is what the gameplay loop will be. I'm leaning towards having the main play-through be finite and level-based, with level 5 being the end (and maybe a secret level). However, that wouldn't stop me from including an endless run mode that would loop through the levels but scale in difficulty each time the player passes level 5. I think the simplest thing to do is add additional enemies instead of changing any actual modifiers. For the endless mode, there would be no way to recover any HP, so I kinda think getting past 10 levels would be pretty hard.
Menus still need lots of work. I'm going to start with the character selection menu first, since that one won't need any structural changes.
0 comments
PUZZLE PUPPIES v1.1.0 UPDATE 6-11-2026: The "Sorry About the Permadeath" Update
Okay so. When I launched Puzzle Puppies I made a choice that a bunch of you politely let me know was a mistake: if you got stuck on a level, you lost your whole run and started over from level 1. I thought it was fun in a pseudoroguelike way. It was just annoying, my bad.
So the headline change in 1.1.0: PERMADEATH IS GONE. Fail a level and you can just retry it. There's also a proper level select on the main menu now, so you can jump back to any level you've reached. Your progress saves between sessions. Play how you want, the choice is yours :)
Mouse support (optional). PC and web players can now click tiles directly instead of fighting the cursor. It's off by default — flip it on from the pause menu once you start the game (hit Enter/P mid-game). Speedrunning is now an option, I guess? Mouse-driven play will be quite speedy!
Cursor controls got simpler. The old keyboard/controller movement tried to be clever about hopping between dogs and mostly just felt like a coin flip. Now it moves one tile at a time in the direction you press. Predictable. Boring. Good.
0 comments